Many thanks to Jaeger for all of the hard work working through the process and sharing with us. I have been getting ready to install an SSD in my e89 using this guide and ran into a couple of major problems that I thought I would share my solutions. I am running VMplayer 15.5 and Neutrino641Target. I tried 3 different OS(Win10, Ubuntu and Mint) all on a couple of Dell laptops. These issues may be unique to my setup but I thought I would pass it on as it cost me many hours. BTW vmplayer only works on newer pc’s the support virtualization and that must be enabled in BIOS.
1.
Mouse pointer disappears within vm target. Once I click in the box the pointer disappears making it nearly impossible to do anything. The solution is to change the mouse from “software” to “hardware” in the Display config. Unfortunately, you need to make the change with no mouse. My solution was to click in box, cursor disappears, right click to get a menu, TAB and arrow keys are used to navigate to “Display” then ENTER. Navigate to the mouse selector and change “software” to “hardware”, Accept and quickly confirm in a new popup it reverts in a few seconds. I found this solution from a vm workstation forum from some years but did not bookmark.
2.
Cannot get Boot Menu as hard drive boot occurs too quickly. This is a problem then booting to ubcd iso in order to extend the partitions. The solution is to add a delay in the startup so you can click in black box and hit ESC in order to bring up Boot menu. To add the delayput the following line to Neutrino641Target.vmx.
bios.bootDelay = "xxxx" where xxxx is delay in milliseconds, I used 10000, the max
You must power down Neutrino before editing as the file is writen as Neutrino exits.
I found this at
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1004129
My parts arrive this week so I will attempt the process.