Stuck on gray screen after installing 10.6 with vmware workstation 7.1.3

[tomchook]

Hello,

I just finished installing Snow Leopard (10.6.3) through vmware workstation 7.1.3 build-324285

 

My computer is HP Pavilion dv9750ej

Processor: 2.20 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500

Memory: 2048 MB (2 x 1024 MB)

Graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS (256 MB)

 

After the first restart of the virtual machine (when I was prompt by the installation), I was able to see everything, although it felt very slow.

Then I restarted again, and reached a state where I see the background picture only, and that spinning thinking wheel. It was spinning endlessly, so I restarted again, and since then I'm able to reach only the gray screen where the gray circle spins endlessly (my computer's HDD doesn't show signs of workload , so I guess it's just stuck).

 

In the vmware preferences I set the CD/DVD (IDE) to load the darwin_snow.iso (without it I won't be able to load anything at all).

 

How can I make it work?

Thanks!

 

Edit: I found a solution: open Mac OS Snow Leopard.vmx file in text editor, look for smc.present=”TRUE” line. Change this value to FALSE. So, it will be smc.present=”FALSE”. Does anybody knows what is it doing? And how can I tell if I have graphic acceleration or not?

 

Thank you!