virtualbox.org

So I have OS X Lion 10.7.5 on my old iMac (27", mid-2011, model 12,2). I want to upgrade to High Sierra, but I have some old apps that won't run under HS, so I want to P2V my old Lion install so I can run it as a VM when I need to use those apps.

FWIW, I have successfully installed HS on an external hard disk and can boot from it. I even installed Virtualbox on it. But the problem remains, how to P2V the Lion installation on the internal hard drive? Would something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or Super Duper, or even Parallels create a disk image that could be imported as a Virtualbox disk? How do I do that?

Worst case scenario, I could just use CCC to clone the internal hard drive to an external one, then upgrade the internal drive to High Sierra, and boot Lion from the external drive when necessary. But I would strongly prefer a VM solution.

I understand that OS X/Mac OS guests are not officially supported, but I don't believe I am violating Apple's EULA by doing this. I would be running on an Apple machine both the host and guest.

Thanks for any help.

Let's start with the disclaimer: P2V on a Mac is no monkey business. I would suggest against it. Plus, I've never tried it, so I wouldn't know where to point you to. But just the complicated partitioning scheme alone is a royal pain!

kydar wrote:FWIW, I have successfully installed HS on an external hard disk and can boot from it.

And it didn't crash your iMac? It managed to do that with my MBP . At least you're in a good position. You could try and test-install an 10.7 client, preferably the one that came with your iMac. Do you have the physical media?

kydar wrote:Would something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or Super Duper, or even Parallels create a disk image that could be imported as a Virtualbox disk? How do I do that?

No clue. That's why I'm trying to work around those things...

kydar wrote:I understand that OS X/Mac OS guests are not officially supported

Since when? They're absolutely supported, both as a host and as a guest. From both VirtualBox and Apple.

kydar wrote:I don't believe I am violating Apple's EULA by doing this. I would be running on an Apple machine both the host and guest.

You're absolutely correct. You can sleep safe at night, knowing that the black-ops from Apple are not after you...

Now to the important thinking part. How to do it...

1. What do you have in your 10.7 that you can't install afterwards on the VM? If you think about it, you could have a fresh start with a new VM, without all the garbage that gets accumulated over the years.
2. I would get myself a new HD, that's what I always do when I do a major upgrade. It has two advantages: a) I get a bigger one, and b) I "retire" the old one as is, as an archive, a backup. Then remove the old HD from the iMac and replace it with the new one, your new host!
3. Install the 10.13 on the new HD, then when the time comes to "restore" your user data/applications, pick "An external HD" and connect the HD that you retired. You'll need an external USB3 HD case for that. Bonus: you get to keep only the compatible applications. Do not worry about apps that are not 10.7 compatible anymore, and do not install apps that have gotten a 10.13-only upgrade (e.g. Onyx - if you have that).
4. Install a 10.7 VM in your shiny-new host. When the time comes to "restore" your user data/applications, pick "An external HD" and connect the HD that you retired. You'll need the external USB3 HD case, *and* to make a USB pass-through of the case to the guest. Details on a later post if you want.

That's it. Cost: 1 new HD + 1 USB3 HD case (if you don't have one). Leftovers: 1 backup HD, in case something goes wrong.

socratis wrote:

kydar wrote:I understand that OS X/Mac OS guests are not officially supported

Since when? They're absolutely supported, both as a host and as a guest. From both VirtualBox and Apple.

Actually it is quite true that OS X is not officially supported as a guest, the devs have said so several times in the past. E.g. witness the fact that there are no GAs for OS X. Even the user manual (section 3.1) says that OS X guests have experimental status only, and are restricted to certain use cases.

As far as I know, release versions of OS X are fully supported as host.

mpack wrote:E.g. witness the fact that there are no GAs for OS X.

That's the state for DOS and Win9x as well. They're still supported guests. There's no not-supported if it has a template, see Android. They wouldn't have dedicated sections of the manual for something that's unsupported, and they do for OSX.

mpack wrote:Even the user manual (section 3.1) says that OS X guests have experimental status only

The manual needs an update, seriously. At some point it says "Mac OS X guests only work with one CPU assigned to the VM. Support for SMP will be provided in a future release". In reality SMP was working partially (not for all OSX guest versions) since 4.3 and that was only for the installer part, not after the installation. Things keep on improving with every release.

socratis wrote:

mpack wrote:E.g. witness the fact that there are no GAs for OS X.

That's the state for DOS and Win9x as well. They're still supported guests.

Actually, they're not. Those are both in the "limited testing has been done" category (same section of user manual), i.e. making sure that they work is not a priority.

socratis wrote:Do you have the physical media?

OS X Lion was the first iteration that came without installation media. Also, on Macs that came with Lion pre-installed, you can't even download the Lion installer from the Mac App store. You have to use the recovery partition, or, that failing, Lion Internet Recovery. However, see below.

socratis wrote: What do you have in your 10.7 that you can't install afterwards on the VM? If you think about it, you could have a fresh start with a new VM, without all the garbage that gets accumulated over the years.

This gave me an idea. It was starting to seem like P2V'ing the existing machine was going to be a mission, and the fact is, I don't have anything on it that couldn't be relatively easily reinstalled, why not just create a new VM with a clean Lion install, and transfer/reinstall anything needed? Ah, but the problem remained, no installation media.

Macworld to the rescue! I found an article on how to create a Lion installer media. Here is the link for anyone interested.
https://www.macworld.com/article/116533 ... -macs.html

I needed to do a little tweak to Macworld's instructions. I downloaded the installer fine, but I kept getting an error message when attempting to use Disk Utility to restore it to the SD card. I found an article at http://www.fixedbyvonnie.com/2014/04/re ... mavericks/ that helped. The article was written for Mavericks, but it worked for Lion too.

So in the end I was able to create my Lion installer on an SD card, and then used that to create a new VM in Virtualbox, and it runs perfectly. Thanks to all for the help. I hope the links I listed might help anyone else trying to do the same thing. This thread should be marked SOLVED.

Great, thanks for the feedback and the links. I'm not going to mark this as [Solved], because the title along with that characterization next to it, would actually be a... mischaracterization. We didn't actually "solve" the p2v of a 10.7 installation...

socratis wrote:We didn't actually "solve" the p2v of a 10.7 installation...

True. With regard to that...

I have to admit that I'm pretty new at Virtualbox. I have a bit more experience creating and using VMs with VMware Player. VMware, as I'm sure you know, provides a "converter" tool to assist in P2V'ing existing installations. Unfortunately, it does not support OS X/Mac OS. And Virtualbox, AFAIK, does not provide a similar tool. Those two facts made me realize that P2V'ing my Lion box was probably going to be essentially impossible. Then you gave me the tip about creating a new VM instead, and I knew I had to figure out a way to create a Lion install media (as detailed in my previous post).

There may still be a way to P2V an OS X installation by creating a system image with Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, or Disk Utility...or even dd for a hardcore command-line approach, and then using it as the install media for Virtualbox. If I do decide to try one of these routes in the future, I'll update this thread. But for now, for my purposes, creating a new VM and then reinstalling those apps which run under Lion but not High Sierra will accomplish what I need to do.

I have to admit, I'm a little curious to try and take a copy of the new Lion VM I created, and try to run it under Virtualbox on my Windows machine. But of course, shhhhh.......

kydar wrote:There may still be a way to P2V an OS X installation...

Hmm... You're giving me side-project ideas!

kydar wrote:I'm a little curious to try and take a copy of the new Lion VM I created, and try to run it under Virtualbox on my Windows machine. But of course, shhhhh.......

Oh, there's nothing to hide; it won't run, I've tried it.

OSX checks to see if it's running on Apple hardware, and actually very specific Apple hardware (remember that part if you update your computer and your 10.7 VM doesn't run anymore). In order to bypass these checks, you'll have to hack it, hence the birth of Hackintosh. Shhhhh...