Unable to instal MacOS Leopard on VirtualBox 7 Running On A Mac

[Orlando]

Hi.

I installed VirtualBox 7 on my 27" iMac running MacOS Big Sur. The idea was to instal a 32 bit version of MacOS Leopard and run an old application that will no longer run on the new system. Well, I haven't been able to. I have the.iso version but the installer stops almost as soon as I hit play. Any idea what the problem could be? Has anyone done this successfully before?

I included a screen capture so you'll see what I'm getting.

[granada29]

A couple of things.

1. You are installing Snow Leopard. This is NOT Leopard. (Leopard was the predecessor of Snow Leopard)
2. I have never installed 32-bit Snow Leopard. The 64 bit version will run 32 bit applications, unless you are trying to test kernel extensions.
3. Try installing with a single CPU - you can always increase that later.
4. Make sure USB 2 is enabled.
5. Disable audio.
6. Have a read through viewtopic.php?f=22&t=104430 . This topic covers many problems associated with Snow Leopard guests.

[Orlando]

I tried every one of your suggestions and in each case this is what I'm getting.

[granada29]

Please edit your screenshots with Preview.app before posting. You need to reduce their size to about 50% so that they appear normal size in these forums.

The EFI shell probably means that your ISO is not a bootable image. There is a posting in the MacOS X Guests forum that gives a lot of hints on how to create a bootable ISO from the macOS Installer. See viewtopic.php?f=22&t=81443

A compressed VBox.log could be helpful.
Shut down your VM.
Right-click your VM in VirtualBox Manager.
Choose 'Show in Finder'.
Open the Logs folder and right-click VBox.log to compress it.

Note to Mods: Please move this topic to MacOS X Guests

[Orlando]

I have no idea what you're talking about. I thought this was a plug and play solution but it's clearly above my level of knowledge.

[scottgus1]

It is fairly plug and play, if you're not installing a Mac OS. Between Apple's non-ISO installer formats, and their iron grip on the hardware the OS's can run on, Mac is a tad harder to get going than Windows or Linux.

Work though the processes in the link and you'll get there. How bad you want this will determine whether you get there.

[Orlando]

I think this is what you were asking for.

[scottgus1]

I'm not too sure about debugging Mac VM logs, but one thing you could try:

The EFI Interactive Shell is not an error. It's the EFI command line. As granada29 points out, this may have come up because what you had for an installer doesn't register as a real ISO and cannot be booted from.

But it could also be that EFI sometimes will skip the bootable ISO if it thinks there's an OS on the VM's disk drive (or something like that).

Try typing exit when you get to the command prompt. It will take you to a black-on-gray EFI Boot Loader menu page, where you can select to try to boot from the VM's CD drive. If the ISO is bootable, it'll boot. If the VM doesn't boot or goes back to the EFI shell, then the ISO isn't bootable and you'll need to try the "how to make the ISO" tutorial again.