Where is the Mountain Lion HOWTO?

[bmike]

I have a Mac Host running Mountain Lion and wish to get my first Mac Guest OS running and am not able to find a HOW TO to get me started. I set up a few Windows 8 VM from downloading the ISO from Microsoft and that was breeze, but I don't know how to proceed on what would seem to me as an easier task of getting OS X running on a Mac.

My MacBook Air (Mid 2011) can run Lion or Mountain Lion and I saw some old forum posts saying never to ask about installing client versions of Lion but since OS X server is now an application that runs on top of the client OS, I'm scratching my head how to get started.

I have a full retail 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD that won't install into a Mac Guest (probably by design) as it sits at the UEFI interactive shell prompt 2.0 Shell> . In addition to the DVD, I also have legal licensed copies of Lion and Mountain Lion installer applications as well as the Server install for both and intent to run my clients only on Mac hardware. My plan was to run the installer once I had 10.6.8 installed on the VM - but I'll need help to get there or a different road map to follow.

Is there a guide that documents how to get Lion or Mountain Lion OS running so I can evaluate things? I'd rather be on the latest OS, but for most of my work I'm fine with the path of least resistance to get started.

[grahamperrin]

Important notice regarding Mac OS X as Guest – unfortunately not open to discussion but probably outdated, since I find https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11066 (but not in the changelog for 4.2.2).

2012-11-15 07-47-53 screenshot.png (115.53 KiB) Viewed 14955 times

My most recent guide in Ask Different at http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/58612/8546 is a little outdated and may be simplified. Note in particular the comment about suspected unannounced changes. For the VirtualBoxVM in the screenshot above I have both VirtualBox and ZFS snapshots. My next step is to see whether the VM will restart without
/Extra

… full retail 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD …

If Snow Leopard will be a starting point, then the requirement may be Mac OS X Server 10.6.3 (no lesser version of that Server version of the OS).

[grahamperrin]

My next step is to see whether the VM will restart without
/Extra

Yes, success. But the environment is not as clean as I'd like, because it began with a false assumption that VirtualBox 4.2.2 included no changes for OS X Lion and Mountain Lion guests.

Someone should please try a clean installation of OS X – thanks.

[grahamperrin]

Preliminary test results for VirtualBox 4.2.4 with EFI enabled in the guest:

1. whilst Install OS X Mountain Lion.app 1.3.18 (352.4) in a VirtualBoxVM can install what's initially required (to /OS X Install Data at the root of a volume), the subsequent automated reboot of the guest fails to start the machine with the installer in front
2. an image of a clean installation of OS X 10.8.2 may start, run, restart and shut down without difficulty in the VirtualBoxVM.

Considering point (a), I might expect approach (b) to have a good Apple_Boot partition/slice for recovery but not Recovery OS capability.