crazyworld: How to Run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in a Virtual Machine with VMWare

Saturday, August 6, 2011

How to Run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in a Virtual Machine with VMWare

If you want to run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion but you don' t want to bother setting up another partition or upgrading your existing Mac OS X 10.6, This Mac tutorial guide teaches you how to run Lion in a virtual machine with VMWare. You will need software: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Virtual Machine Mac OS X v10.6

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion released. Do you want to try it for yourself. If you want to run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion but you don't want to bother setting up another partition or upgrading your existing Mac OS X 10.6 installation. Do you know how to run Lion in a virtual machine with VMWare? This Mac tutorial guide helps you make it out.

How to Install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in Virtual Machine with VMWare

Step 1

Create a blank disk image.
Using Disk Utility to create and mount a new image with the following settings. You can name it whatever you want but be sure to modify the steps below accordingly.

Step 2

Mount the Lion installer image.
The image mounts as 'Mac OS X Install ESD'. If yours mounts as something different, then you will need to make any necessary changes to reflect that in the following steps.

Step 3

Mount the Base System image.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion installer image contains a bunch of hidden files, to get to them you'll need to run the Terminal application. One of these hidden files is BaseSystem.dmg which is used to boot the system. The volume will mount as 'Mac OS X Base System'

Step 4

Copy the base system.
The entire contents of the base system needs to be copied to your installer image. The 'Restore' feature in Disk Utility works great for this. Once that is finished, you can eject the BaseSystem image, it is no longer needed.

Step 5

Setup the 'kernelcache' file.
First the file needs to be copied from the Lion installer image to your installer image, then the boot configuration file updated to specify the location of the file. Make sure the boot file contains at least the following key/value to specify the location of the kernelcache file: \kernelcache

Step 6

Copy the installation Packages.
Before the packages can be copied from the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion installer image, there's a file on your installer image that needs to be deleted. The copy command will take a few minutes; it's copying a few gigabytes of data.

Step 7

Flag the system as a server installation.
In order to boot an Mac OS X volume in VMware, it needs to be a server. The system checks for the existence of a file in a specific location; you can imitate a server installation simply by creating that file.

Step 8

Create a virtual machine.

Step 9

Replace the VMs NVRAM.
Download and uncompress the nvram file. Locate your VM within the Finder, right click and select "Show Package Contents". Delete the current nvram file if one exists.
Copy the downloaded nvram file into the folder and rename it to match the name of your VM; you can named, "Mac OS X 10.7", so the nvram file would be renamed to "Mac OS X 10.7.nvram"

Step 10

Installing Lion.
After the installation disk boots up, the first thing you should do is run Disk Utility and format the hard drive. All the norms apply; GUID partition map, Mac OS X Extended format, etc. When done, Quit to return to the installer. Continue with the installation. When the installation is complete, it will attempt to reboot the VM using the freshly installed OS on the hard disk. It won't boot, because it's not a server installation.

Step 11

Forcing the VM to boot from the CD.
VMware will not let you change the startup disk in the VMs settings, so you'll have to force a change while the VM is running. Start the VM. hit the escape key. select "Boot Manager" With "Mac OS X" selected, You can through the list to determine which device would be the CD to boot from. If you choose the wrong device the first time, you can just restart the VM and choose another until you get it right.

Step 12

Flag the new system as a server installation.
After the VM boots from the install disk again, run the Terminal from the Utilities menu. labeled your HD, "OS X Lion HD" when you initialized it.

Now quit the Terminal and choose Startup Disk from the Utilities menu, restart from the hard disk. Then you can run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in Virtual Machine with VMWare.