VirtualBox on Mac OS X

Date

I recently got a Mac Mini so I can start working on Macintosh-specific issues with matplotlib. Thanks again to Hans Petter Langtangen, the Director of the Center for Biomedical Computing at Simula for his gracious donation that supported the purchase.

One of the things I'd like to use this machine for is to test installers in various environments -- a fresh install, or with MacPorts, or Fink etc. -- to make sure the installers include everything they need. So I want to run Mac OS X in a virtual machine that I can reset on a regular basis to a known state. This is now allowed by the licensing of OS X, as long as it's running on top of genuine Apple hardware, and you create no more than 5 instances.

It's surprisingly hard to find information on installing Mac OS X in a virtual machine. Most of what Google finds is various hacks to run on non-Apple hardware. I, instead, want to do this legally.

Unfortunately, the Mac Mini came with no installation media, so you can't just plug it in and install it in a virtual machine. I thought, ok, no problem -- I'll just pop over to the App Store and download it. Unfortunately, to do that, Apple wanted to charge me $29.99 for something I already own.

So next I looked at the recovery partition. Parallels is reportedly able to use the recovery partition directly to install in the virtual machine. However, I want to use VirtualBox, since it is open source, what I'm familiar with on Linux, and, most importantly, because it can be automated by vagrant. After trying in vain to point VirtualBox at the magic stuff in the recovery partition, I came upon a working solution. The following steps were done with Mountain Lion, and I have no idea whether they are applicable to other releases.

  • Grab an external USB drive and plug it in. I think it needs to be at least the size of a double-layer DVD, or 8.5 GB. This process will erase everything on it.

  • Reboot into recovery mode, by holding down Command+R during boot. (A word of advice to those new to Macs: wait until you hear the startup sound until you press the keys down, and hold them until the Apple logo disappears. Timing seems to be important here).

  • I list of utilities will appear. Open "Disk Manager" and repartition the external disk to have a "GUID" partition table with a single "HFS+" partition.

  • Exit "Disk Manager" and then go to "Install OS X". Install it to the external drive.

  • When the installation is done, the system will reboot back into your "host" installation on the internal drive. (I was surprised by this -- you may need to remove the USB drive to boot into the internal drive, but I didn't need to).

  • The result is a folder on the external drive called "OS X Install Data". Inside that folder is a disk image of the installer, InstallESD.dmg. Copy this to your internal hard disk. You can then remove the external USB drive, we're done with it.

  • Unfortunately, there is still a small incompatibility with power management inside of VirtualBox that will cause the installer to hang during boot. The kernel extension that handles CPU power management needs to be replaced. I found the instructions for that here. I'm paraphrasing it here, and only including instructions for Mountain Lion.

    • Download InstallESD.dmg.tool.

    • Download NullCPUPowerManagement.kext

    • Run the following command:

      ./InstallESD.dmg.tool -i InstallESD.dmg -o Output.dmg -- NullCPUPowerManagement.kext

  • The Output.dmg is now a patched installer image that can be used to install OS X in VirtualBox.

  • In VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine and use its default settings for an OS X guest. Then, open the settings for the machine and go to the Storage tab. Add a new CD/DVD device to the IDE bus (it must be IDE: SATA did not work for me), and select the Output.dmg from the file dialog. Check the "Live CD/DVD" box.

  • You now should be able to boot into the installer and install OS X within VirtualBox. When the installer is ready to reboot, go back to VirtualBox settings and "eject" the virtual DVD before restarting.

Hopefully this will help others out.

Comments

comments powered by Disqus