With the release of 10.7, Apple changed the way OS was packaged, the digital distribution came with a disk image named InstallESD.dmg nested inside an application named Install Mac OS X Lion.app. I’ve managed to install 10.7 to 10.10 successfully on virtualbox so far. Virtualbox supports OS X guests but when following the usual steps in the wizard to create a new VM & pointing it to your unmodified OS image, nothing much happens.ĭepending on the version of OS X you’re trying to boot you’ll either end up with a XNU hang/panic or just dropped straight to an EFI prompt.Īgain, depending on the version of OS X being attempted the issue differs. Searching around reveals using modified images intended for building Hackintosh as the solution most people use.
At present I’m confined to testing on Tiger and Mavericks though I also have machines running Leopard and Lion but they need setting up.īy default, it’s not possible to boot an instance of Mac OS X from a genuine install image, on a Mac host, running OS X using virtualbox. For testing changes related to OS X in pkgsrc I revisited trying to get virtual machines of the various releases of OS X running to improve test coverage.
