If the VM's password was saved by Fusion in the Keychain, it can still find it there when running on Sequoia and not ask you for it to unlock the VM. I've found that none of my encrypted VM that have had their passwords saved by Fusion have asked for a password on power on. I upgraded in-place from Sonoma to Sequoia, so none of my VMs were moved. If you have an encrypted VM that's asking you for a password when you told Fusion to save it, then you probably have another problem.
The new Passwords app does not show everything stored in the Keychain. Fusion saved passwords are one of them. As noted, you still need to use Keychain Access to find those items.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
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Original Message:
Sent: Sep 17, 2024 05:53 PM
From: William Cody
Subject: VM encrypted itself, don't know the password
Update: For macOS users who upgraded to Sequoia, the legacy "Keychain" app is still available, and contains content that the new Passwords app does not. For example, I found my old VMWare encryption password there, but it never appeared in Passwords.
You can find and run the legacy Keychain app from here:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Keychain Access.app
This may save some headaches for Mac users presented with the "encrypted" image that's looking for a password.
Original Message:
Sent: Sep 17, 2024 02:45 AM
From: William Cody
Subject: VM encrypted itself, don't know the password
This absolutely worked for me. I upgraded my Mac from macOS 14 to 15, which introduced the new "Passwords" app, but it failed to keep the keychain password for VMWare. Bravo.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 31, 2023 11:30 PM
From: jamiljonna
Subject: VM encrypted itself, don't know the password
Not sure why this solution did not pop up here but I just did the following:
- Created a new custom virtual machine
- Choose Windows 11 64-bit Arm
- Leave UEFI Secure Boot unchecked
- Auto-generate the password and save in keychain
- Select Use an existing virtual disk
- Find the useless encrypted VM (for which no password exists); then select Virtual Disk.vmdk
- Choose Make a copy of the virtual disk
After the copying process the new VM started up right away and worked as expected from the previous stored state.