Getting UEFI shell when trying to boot OS X in Virtual Box

You have to disable EFI boot in the machine settings. Then it will work, however, you will have to have Chameleon installed on the .cdr image.


  1. Type exit at the UEFI Shell Prompt
  2. Go to Boot Maintenance Manager
  3. Choose Boot From File
  4. Go to Preboot....
  5. Navigate through [Some GUID] -> System -> Library -> CoreServices
  6. Finally select boot.efi

Your machine should now boot up. Works for me for Big Sur.


This is not working in VirtualBox at the time of writing (2015-10-07).

Apple migrated the format of the partition table for El Capitan boot image from MBR to GPT and VirtualBox does not yet support HFS+ filesystems on GPT partitioned drives when starting from EFI.

Refer to this issue:

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14490