How to fix the black screen problem of VMWare Fusion on OS X Catalina

Samuel Yang
1 min readOct 11, 2019
Photo by Maxwell Nelson on Unsplash

How to fix the black screen problem of Fusion on OS X Catalina 10.15.

After upgrading to OS X Catalina, my VMWare Fusion 10.1.6 stopped working. It only showed black screen.

Update: Now there is an official KB article on this.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/79989

Here is how I solved the black screen problem of my VMWare Fusion 10 before the official KB.

  1. Download the version Fusion “11.1.0”(exact) from VMWare. You can run it in trial period.
  2. Install “11.1.0”, and then run it. When it asks for the permission on Screen Recording, allow it!
  3. Test run your VM, and see the black screen go away. (Don’t upgrade your VM though, as you will go back to your version of Fusion.)
  4. Now, re-install the version of the VMWare Fusion you purchased.
  5. Run your VM with your version of Fusion. Voila!

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