Fedora 30 not booting as VM on ESXi 6.7

i upgraded my VM fedora mate spin 28->29 without issue. booted ok and ran fine. recently did the upgrade from 29->30. now will not boot nor will it boot to rescue mode.

downloaded the fedora mate 30 spin & fedora cinnamon 30 spin iso’s and installed those as VM’s. same issue. won’t boot nor boot into rescue. it hangs at the black screen with the fedora image bottom of screen.

luckily on the fedora mate 29 install i can choose that version and it boots & runs.

odd is it lists the /etc/fedora-release as “Fedora release 30 (Thirty) though ‘uname -mrs’ returns, " Linux 5.2.7-100.fc29.x86_64 x86_64”

any ideas/fixes for either of these two ver30 spins so i can get them running?

i made an interesting observation. i added a second disk to my kali_2019-1 VM. that second disk is the Fedora Mate 30 spin vmdk. it loaded under this version of kali but didn’t under a 2018 version. i was able to edit the grub in /etc/default/grub.cfg for the Fedora 30 disk and removed the “quiet” and “rhgb” items in the command line. ran debains ‘update-grub’ util and it put the Fedora 30 item in the boot menu. i only did this to see if removing those two items would help.

it didn’t when booting straight to Fedora 30 as before. but i noticed when i booted the kali2019-1 VM and choosing the Fedora 30 item, how bout that, it booted.

the main diff between the VM configs was kali had guest os as “Debian GNU/Linux 9 (64-bit)” and Fedora 30 had guest os as "Red Hat Fedora (x64) ". so i switched the guest os for Fedora 30 to "Debian GN/Linux 10 (64-bit). figured i try ver 10 vs ver 9. yep, Fedora Mate 30 spin booted just fine on its own and its disk/drive was removed from kali.

i haven’t gone through any syslog files on the Fedora VM or vSphere’s logs. vSphere does display this, “Hardware GPU resources are not available. The virtual machine will use software rendering.” Fedora isn’t returning that message though like it did originally. there is a nice Radeon card in the server but never had much luck with passthru.

for now for my setup, switching guest os to Debian from Red Hat Fedora allowed it boot and run. all i know for now…more late if something arises to report. maybe someone at Fedora/Spins has any ideas…