Solution for installing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in a VM on a 2017 MacBook

[hikari_no_yume]

Hi. I've been doing some work recently where I needed certain old versions of Mac OS X in a VM.

I am using VirtualBox 6.1.36 in macOS 12.6.3 Monterey. My laptop is specifically a “MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, 2017)” with “1.3GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5”.

I found that I could install Lion (using the official DMG download from Apple's site) without doing anything special. It was just a standard VM with none of the defaults changed. Likewise for Snow Leopard (using an installer disc image).

Leopard (using an installer disc image) was more difficult however. Within a few seconds of starting booting from the disc, it would experience a kernel panic in the “com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement” module.

I found a post somewhere on these forums that indicated the problem is the too new host CPU, and that you can fix it by modifying the VM's CPU profile, but the CPU in that post (some Core i7?) must have been too new, because their suggestion didn't work. I kept the idea in mind however.

Then I found viewtopic.php?t=99985. It seems that user was breaking the rules by using non-Apple hardware. However, I could see from their post that “Intel Core2 T7600 2.33GHz” might be a suitable CPU profile. So I tried using this command (”Leoparden” is the name of my VM):

/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage modifyvm Leoparden --cpu-profile 'Intel Core2 T7600 2.33GHz'

That was all that was necessary to get the installer to boot and work.

After installing, however, I had some trouble where it refused to boot from the hard drive, instead booting from the disc again. I think I got the NVRAM/EFI state into some weird place. I created a new VM with the same disk image and then it booted fine. I suspect this won't be necessary for others.

I hope this helps someone.

[SS1953]

Thank you so much for the information. Changing the CPU Type worked like a charm, almost. The first problem I ran into was that the VM kept booting from the installer ISO even though I chose the VM's hard drive as the startup disk. When I removed the ISO, I booted into the configuration. I identified the keyboard and then it asked me if I wanted to transfer information from another Mac. When I chose not to transfer, I was directed back to identifying the keyboard. Any ideas?

[multiOS]

The first problem I ran into was that the VM kept booting from the installer ISO even though I chose the VM's hard drive as the startup disk. When I removed the ISO, I booted into the configuration. I identified the keyboard and then it asked me if I wanted to transfer information from another Mac. When I chose not to transfer, I was directed back to identifying the keyboard. Any ideas?

If you changed the boot order using VirtualBox Manager Settings then that does not work for EFI installations. The boot order has to be changed manually in the VM's EFI settings. The next time you attempt to start the VM press the 'Escape' continually until the EFI settings screen launches and make the necessary change there. Please make sure you save the new settings before exiting the EFI screen