How to increase the VMWare boot screen delay

If you’ve wanted to try out a bootable CD or USB flash drive in a virtual machine environment, you’ve probably noticed that VMWare’s offerings make it difficult to change the boot device. We’ll show you how to change these options.

Find the .vmx file that contains the settings for your virtual machine. You chose a location for this when you created the virtual machine – in Windows, the default location is a folder called My Virtual Machines in your My Documents folder.

In VMWare Workstation, the location of the .vmx file is listed on the virtual machine’s tab.

Open the .vmx file with any text editor.

Somewhere in this file, enter in the following line… save the file, then close out of the text editor:

bios.bootdelay = 20000

Original page: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16876/how-to-increase-the-vmware-boot-screen-delay/