Running 10.5, 10.6 on a 10.6.4 or later Mac?

[abrody]

I have retail versions of 10.5 and 10.6 and also an iMac Intel 10.4 installer disc and I wanted to know if Virtualbox will let me run each of those operating systems on a Mac that shipped with 10.6. If so, what are the steps to get it to install? I've not yet been able to figure it out with Virtualbox 4.1.0 on my 10.7.3 installed Mac?

[DNS]

Trying to run earlier versions of MacOSX will not work on a newer machine because the older copies will check your CPUID against a preapproved list of Intel CPUs that only existed at the time.

There are ways to get around these restrictions however they can't be detailed here due to terms of service.

[rpmurray]

Yes, it's possible. I've done both the server and client versions of 10.4 (Intel), 10.5 and 10.6 (retail version of client is 10.6.3), on an iMac 2010 and a Mac Pro 2008 both running Mac OS X 10.6.8 as the host OS and VB 4.0.16. While detailed instructions for doing this cannot be discussed on these forums due to the TOS and Apple's EULA (and the fact that Oracle doesn't what to get in legal hot water with Apple), discussing the roadblocks (but not the solutions) should be possible. Once you know what you're up against you can google the web where they are myriads of websites and blogs with helpful advice.

After making sure you've chosen the proper VB settings for the guest (for example; EFI is a must), your first problem is getting the installer disc to boot in your VM so you can install Mac OS X as a guest. The OS does a check on startup to see if the CPUID matches all the CPUs that Apple had in supported Macs at the time the OS was released. If your CPU is not among them (Macs released after the retail release of the OS) then you will get the dreaded "Unsupported CPU" panic message (see Panic: Unsupported CPU when trying to install mac os on VB. The CPUID of your host is passed through to the VM guest by VB.

If you make it past the above hurdle you then need to deal with the installer app, which also does a check to make sure that the model number of your Mac (such as MacPro3,1 for a 2008 Mac Pro) matches those of supported Macs at the time the OS was released. This is not passed through to the VM by VB so essentially you're blocked because the installer app does not get that information so it always believes that you're attempting to install on an unsupported Mac (even it you're attempting to use the OS disc that came with your Mac).

If you can make it past these two hurdles then you run into the fact that there are no Guest Additions for a Mac Guest in VB. Without the guest additions you cannot share the clipboard, modify the monitor resolution, sync the clock with the host, or use VB's shared folders, and probably some I'm forgetting.

The clipboard problem could be mollified by using an app that shares the clipboard over the net if you can find an app that would work on both the host and the guest (virtually impossible since nobody is developing apps like this that are still compatible with older versions of OS X).

VB has a means of modifying the display resolution using the Terminal and VBoxManage commands to change the EfiGopMode.

OS X as a guest suffers from a glitch in VB that causes the clock to slow down by about 5% so it very rapidly goes out of sync. The drift is so severe that NTP can't fix it. You can modify the TSCTicksPerSecond property using VBoxManage so that NTP can then work to sync the clock, but if you do anything to sleep the guest (save state) you'll need to manually resync the clock when you make the guest active again because the guest OS has no clue that VB made it inactive, so it doesn't know to do a resync automatically.

Shared folders is not much of a problem because you can do a normal share on the OS X host and then use the Go menu in the Mac OS X guest to Connect to Server (your host) to share files.

Altogether getting a Mac OS X guest working on actual Mac hardware is not nearly as daunting as trying to get it to work on non-Apple hardware, but it is a chore.

[ChipMcK]

Why does a p2v clone not run on vb as it does on one other virtualization package?

[rpmurray]

Why does a p2v clone not run on vb as it does on one other virtualization package?

Because VB != other virtualization package

[ChipMcK]

Other os clones do run on vb. Why should snow leopard kernel-trap? [trapno:0x7 err:0x0]