I needed to do a very quick test on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so I thought “I’ll just setup a VM really quick, do my stuff, and delete it”.

WRONG.

Actually, it was very easy to do so.
But it’s not documented anywhere, not actually supported and took me so fucking long to find my way.

I didn’t use Parallels or others because I don’t like them. VMware is my favorite.

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First, my setup:

- MacBook Pro 13″ mid-2012 running Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5
– VMware Fusion 6.0.3 (latest version as of this post)

What you need:

- Machine able to boot the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Installer (either DVD or USB)
– Spare external HDD to install OSX on (40GB+ recommended)
– VMware Fusion installed on host computer

Steps:

- Boot the installer DVD from your machine as you normally do – my MacBook wouldn’t boot it, so I used a spare Mac mini to do this
– Plug the external drive to the machine and format it with a GUID Partition Table and HFS+ Journaled
– Start the setup as usual and when it asks in which drive you want to install, choose the external drive as target
– Proceed with the installation as usual

When you’re done, plug the drive in the host machine with VMware installed.

- Use?$ diskutil list?to get the external drive device handler (something like?/dev/disk3, which I’ll use as an example)
–?$ cd /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library
– Then create a .VMDK “link” to your external drive:

$ ./vmware-rawdiskCreator create?/dev/disk3?fullDevice~/temp/SnowLeopardVM?ide

* Replace?/dev/disk3?accordingly and change?~/temp/SnowLeopardVM?to wherever you want to put this link on; we will move it later

A file named?SnowLeopardVM.vmdk?will be created in?~/temp

- Now open VMware Fusion
– Create a new virtual machine:

File -> New -> More options… -> Create a custom virtual machine

Choose Apple Mac OS X > Mac OS X Server 10.6 64-bit
Choose “Create a new virtual disk”

- Save it but don’t boot it
– Quit VMware

- Open Finder and go to the location where you saved the VM
– Right-click the .vmwarevm file and click “Show Package Contents”
– Copy the link created before (~/temp/SnowLeopardVM.vmdk) to this location
– Open the .vmx file with a text editor (TextEdit is fine)

At the end of the file, add the lines:

ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "SnowLeopardVM.vmdk"


Save and quit.

Now a very important step:
Since VMware will only allow the server version (pre-Lion) to run virtualized, we need the magic touch to make all this work:

- In Terminal

$ cp /Volumes/externalHDD/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist /Volumes/externalHDD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist

Edit: Copying?SystemVersion.plist?is necessary to install VMware Tools later on. If you don’t need it, a simple “touch?ServerVersion.plist” will work.

At this moment, if you boot the VM, it will boot off the external HDD and everytime you need it, you’ll need to plug the drive.
If you are OK with that, you can stop reading now, otherwise, carry on.

To clone the external drive OS to our VM:

- Boot the VM – it will be a little bit slower since you’re booting from a external drive
– Open “Disk Utility” –?it should show you 2 drives: your external HDD where the OS is installed and the other is the one that we created with the VM
– Select the volume where the OS is installed (i.e. the external drive)
– Go to the “Restore” tab
– Click and drag its volume name to the “Source” field
– Click and drag the volume name of the other disk (the one created with the VM) to the “Destination” field
– Click “Restore” and wait until finish

When it finishes, shutdown the VM, unplug the external HDD, edit the VM settings, “Startup disk” and select the Hard disk created.

That’s it?:)
Let me know if you have doubts.

TODO:
Install VMware Tools?:(

IRC & twitter: enzolovesbacon