Using already installed Leopard on Vmware

[gregorykay]

Hi,

 

I am currently dual booting windows vista and leopard (iatkos). Is it possible within vista to launch this installation of leopard?

 

 

 

Basicly I want to be able to dual boot into leopard and vista and have the capability of running that same leopard from within vmware on vista.

 

 

 

How would i do this?

 

 

 

Thanks

[Biso007]

Hi,

 

I am currently dual booting windows vista and leopard (iatkos). Is it possible within vista to launch this installation of leopard?

 

 

 

Basicly I want to be able to dual boot into leopard and vista and have the capability of running that same leopard from within vmware on vista.

 

 

 

How would i do this?

 

 

 

Thanks

 

That would take you to install VMware Fusion on the Leopard and create a VM image from the system disk (I doubt it's possible as creating a VM image from an existing partition requires not booting from this partition so you need to boot using a USB for example) then you can use this image to create a VM in WS 7

 

that seems a long way .. any thing so special about this leopard installation ? .. creating a new OSX VM is much easier.

[gregorykay]

I dont want to creat an image of my existing install rather I want to be able to boot or use vmware for the same leopard. Meaning instead of vmware using a virtual disk it uses the real HFS+ Disk to startup etc. That way if i want i could boot up into my osx or use vmware if i dont want to reboot, but it would always be the same osx.

[Donk]

I dont want to creat an image of my existing install rather I want to be able to boot or use vmware for the same leopard. Meaning instead of vmware using a virtual disk it uses the real HFS+ Disk to startup etc. That way if i want i could boot up into my osx or use vmware if i dont want to reboot, but it would always be the same osx.

 

Follow my tutorial but when you build the guest select the partition of the drive with Leopard on it(NOT the whole drive). I have used it to boot an external USB drive with a copy of my iMac's hard drive. Tutorial is here, http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=172474, please read thoroughly though as there are various updates scattered around the thread.

 

Make sure you back your disk up first though as using raw disks and partitions in VMware is and advanced topic, and if you get it wrong it could make a big mess!

[Corona]

How strange, I was just about to post a topic on this very subject, and all of a sudden this is at the top of the list.

 

I'm already doing this, booting my actual os x installation in vmware workstation 7, in windows 7 (x64), from the physical disk, on a macbook pro. I have a couple of questions which I'll get to in a sec.

 

Basically as donk said look at his thread, it's a wealth of information. I originally did this probably 6 months to a year ago on a previous installation of this computer, with xp and leopard, but now I'm using workstation 7 on windows 7 and snow leopard. I call it vmware reverse bootcamp for lack of a better name, and I'm planning on writing a nice little howto, but in short all it takes is to make a vm with all the right settings in the vmx (look through the thread, I'll post mine later) and then add a new hard drive to the vm that's pointing to the physical disk. You can use either full disk or partitions, selecting partitions makes sure you can't fry your windows partition however. Then use one of donk's custom darwin.iso's to boot (set the cd rom drive to it). I'm using the one from http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...t&p=1287390 currently.

Oh yeah, you will also want to go to disk management on windows and remove the drive letter from the mac drive if it's mounted via any sort of hfs driver otherwise vmware says you can't use is as it can't sync it.

 

Now the catch. I use Macdrive in windows. Macdrive has a twisted up way of working in that it shows a fake mbr to windows where all mac drives have a pid of 0x07 same as ntfs, something to do with the way it's driver works. It also locks this mbr so that you can't manually change the pid back to 0xAF for mac (this fake mbr disappears when you reboot, so it doens't actually touch the real mbr). This means that if macdrive is enabled when you run vmware then the darwin bootloader on donk's modified iso it can't find your mac drive to boot. switch off macdrive and reboot, and the same vmx boots just fine (although you have to re-add the physical disk as vmware sees it's partition as changed).

 

Does anyone have any idea how to make darwin.iso find a partition that's not set to 0xaf?

I've tried a lot of things, including talking to macdrive support (who haven't been helpful as yet).

Tried disabling the drive in hope that macdrive doesn't see it, didn't help as macdrive locks the entire drive (ie can't even touch the windows partition).

Tried modifying the vmdk files to trick vmware into thinking the drive had a 0xaf but then vmware just cracks the sads that the partitions have changed and you have to delete the drive from vmware and re add it.

Tried making a separate disk with chameleon installed and a copy of mach_kernel & stuff with boot-uuid=<blah> on it to try to boot the mac disk, and it's complaining about mac os x server not being installed (haven't completely given up on this route).

and a few others, all to no avail.

 

Ideally I just want to change cdpreboot on donk's iso to let it see 0x07 partitions as a mac partition and boot it, or change the id to something else such as ab, darwin boot, and change the bootloader to find it instead - this also stops macdrive from grabbing it.

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated, as soon as I get this macdrive issue sussed I'll make a separate topic with a proper howto, as I'm surprised not more people have wanted to do this. Bootcamp in vmware is great, running the same install of windows side by side mac, this allows me to do the same thing but with windows having full graphics acceleration for cad, but still use mac for all the things that add productivity.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[Donk]

How strange, I was just about to post a topic on this very subject, and all of a sudden this is at the top of the list.

 

I'm already doing this, booting my actual os x installation in vmware workstation 7, in windows 7 (x64), from the physical disk, on a macbook pro. I have a couple of questions which I'll get to in a sec.

 

Basically as donk said look at his thread, it's a wealth of information. I originally did this probably 6 months to a year ago on a previous installation of this computer, with xp and leopard, but now I'm using workstation 7 on windows 7 and snow leopard. I call it vmware reverse bootcamp for lack of a better name, and I'm planning on writing a nice little howto, but in short all it takes is to make a vm with all the right settings in the vmx (look through the thread, I'll post mine later) and then add a new hard drive to the vm that's pointing to the physical disk. You can use either full disk or partitions, selecting partitions makes sure you can't fry your windows partition however. Then use one of donk's custom darwin.iso's to boot (set the cd rom drive to it). I'm using the one from http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...t&p=1287390 currently.

Oh yeah, you will also want to go to disk management on windows and remove the drive letter from the mac drive if it's mounted via any sort of hfs driver otherwise vmware says you can't use is as it can't sync it.

 

Now the catch. I use Macdrive in windows. Macdrive has a twisted up way of working in that it shows a fake mbr to windows where all mac drives have a pid of 0x07 same as ntfs, something to do with the way it's driver works. It also locks this mbr so that you can't manually change the pid back to 0xAF for mac (this fake mbr disappears when you reboot, so it doens't actually touch the real mbr). This means that if macdrive is enabled when you run vmware then the darwin bootloader on donk's modified iso it can't find your mac drive to boot. switch off macdrive and reboot, and the same vmx boots just fine (although you have to re-add the physical disk as vmware sees it's partition as changed).

 

Does anyone have any idea how to make darwin.iso find a partition that's not set to 0xaf?

I've tried a lot of things, including talking to macdrive support (who haven't been helpful as yet).

Tried disabling the drive in hope that macdrive doesn't see it, didn't help as macdrive locks the entire drive (ie can't even touch the windows partition).

Tried modifying the vmdk files to trick vmware into thinking the drive had a 0xaf but then vmware just cracks the sads that the partitions have changed and you have to delete the drive from vmware and re add it.

Tried making a separate disk with chameleon installed and a copy of mach_kernel & stuff with boot-uuid=<blah> on it to try to boot the mac disk, and it's complaining about mac os x server not being installed (haven't completely given up on this route).

and a few others, all to no avail.

 

Ideally I just want to change cdpreboot on donk's iso to let it see 0x07 partitions as a mac partition and boot it, or change the id to something else such as ab, darwin boot, and change the bootloader to find it instead - this also stops macdrive from grabbing it.

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated, as soon as I get this macdrive issue sussed I'll make a separate topic with a proper howto, as I'm surprised not more people have wanted to do this. Bootcamp in vmware is great, running the same install of windows side by side mac, this allows me to do the same thing but with windows having full graphics acceleration for cad, but still use mac for all the things that add productivity.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

 

Interesting issue there, I saw something similar when using BootIT NG with partitions in VMware. Firstly though one word of warning, which you also have mentioned, Windows cannot have any access to the partition or drive when it is running under VMware as it will likely corrupt the drives. This is because HFS and NTFS are not clustered shared filing systems, they expect one OS at a time to have exclusive access. The basic way around that in Windows is to remove the drive letter for the partition in Disk Management. There are many instances on the VMware forums of people not heeding this advice and screwing their systems up.

 

Now the MacDrive specific part. There was a way to take a copy of the MBR in a VMDK and then build a special descriptor file to stop VMware saying the partitions had changed. However that was 5 years ago when I was working on it, and have no idea on exactly what to do any more. I can look around but don't expect a quick answer!

 

As for fixing the VMware code, whilst most of it is based on David Elliott's freely available boot-132 code, he wrote some private code for VMware and we don't have the source code. I have been working on replacing that with Chameleon but not ready for prime time. My advice for now is to disable Macdrive before booting in VMware, just to be safe.

 

One correction you do not point the virtual CD device to darwin.iso. VMware manages that all for you behind the scenes when booting a Mac OS X guest. This behaviour cannot be overriden currently, so any attempts to build other means of booting aren't going to work. Anyway interesting problem, and will have a think about possible solutions.

 

Update:

 

1. What version on MacDrive are you using?

2. How did you install the OS X version?

3. Is the drive GPT or MBR formatted?

[Corona]

Now the MacDrive specific part. There was a way to take a copy of the MBR in a VMDK and then build a special descriptor file to stop VMware saying the partitions had changed. However that was 5 years ago when I was working on it, and have no idea on exactly what to do any more. I can look around but don't expect a quick answer!

 

would you be referring to something like this? http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums.../m/274002236931

I tried that myself and vmware still complained about the partition map being changed, as I grabbed the mbr from mac, and it still compared it to the current (macdrive fake) mbr. I googled for ages to try to find a way to disable vmware's partition checking but didn't find anything.

 

As for fixing the VMware code, whilst most of it is based on David Elliott's freely available boot-132 code, he wrote some private code for VMware and we don't have the source code. I have been working on replacing that with Chameleon but not ready for prime time. My advice for now is to disable Macdrive before booting in VMware, just to be safe.

 

One correction you do not point the virtual CD device to darwin.iso. VMware manages that all for you behind the scenes when booting a Mac OS X guest. This behaviour cannot be overriden currently, so any attempts to build other means of booting aren't going to work. Anyway interesting problem, and will have a think about possible solutions.

 

Update:

 

1. What version on MacDrive are you using?

2. How did you install the OS X version?

3. Is the drive GPT or MBR formatted?

 

The problem with disabling macdrive is it requires a reboot to do so. My shared data partition between mac/windows is hfs+ (so that I can use timemachine to backup) so I need macdrive to be able to do any work in windows.

 

Just checked, I had the macdrive version wrong before, I have version 8.

OSX was installed directly on the macbook as a normal mac install.

Drive is GTP (mbr hybrid obviously) - which reminds me, the other way I should be able to boot the drive is if I can get the bootloader to see the gpt partition map rather than the mbr, and/or would there be any way to use boot-uuid= specifier in conjunction with the vmware cdpreboot booter?

 

Oh, and thanks for the heads up about the virtual drive / iso thing, I had no idea. The virtual drive is how I always did it way back when, I didn't realise vmware knew to find it elsewhere, I'll have to try that.

 

Thanks,

Andrew

 

 

ps. sorry for hijacking your thread gregorykay, but I'm completely planning to help you get your setup working too. If you're not using macdrive let me know and I'll try to get you going. as a start, here's my vmx file for you to compare to / start from.

OSX_raw.vmx.zip

[Donk]

would you be referring to something like this? http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums.../m/274002236931

I tried that myself and vmware still complained about the partition map being changed, as I grabbed the mbr from mac, and it still compared it to the current (macdrive fake) mbr. I googled for ages to try to find a way to disable vmware's partition checking but didn't find anything.

 

That is the sort of thing I was

Well I found MacDrive sets the partition type to MS RAW http://steelpangolin.wordpress.com/2009/03...t-block-000000/. Can you attach the VMDK file used please? It should just be text in this case. The shoudl also be a file xxxx-pt.vmdk, which is binary and would be useful as well. (xxxx will be whatever name you gave the VMDK).

 

The problem with disabling macdrive is it requires a reboot to do so. My shared data partition between mac/windows is hfs+ (so that I can use timemachine to backup) so I need macdrive to be able to do any work in windows.

 

But please remember you cannot access it from Windows whilst the Mac OS X guest is running, or you will corrupt it.

[Corona]

Well I found MacDrive sets the partition type to MS RAW http://steelpangolin.wordpress.com/2009/03...t-block-000000/. Can you attach the VMDK file used please? It should just be text in this case. The shoudl also be a file xxxx-pt.vmdk, which is binary and would be useful as well. (xxxx will be whatever name you gave the VMDK).

 

Hmm, it hadn't even occurred to me that macdrive might change the guid's as well as the mbr, do you know any windows utilities that would print out the current gpt layout as visible to windows?

 

I tried willmo's guid technique from that other page again using the vmware created xxx-pt.vmdk as the mbr.vmdk component of the hand made vmdk file and vmware doesn't complain about the mbr being changed now, but I just got an Operating System Not Found from vmware, which could mean a messed up gpt or a mistake elsewhere. I also tried this with your darwin.iso set to the cd and can get the darwin bootloader up, but I'm back to it only seeing the windows partition, I assume it's working from the mbr not the gpt. If I could get a bootloader on a cd image that uses gpt and ignores mbr, and feed it the gpt as per willmo's guide, then it might work.

 

Either way I've attached a copy of both the hand made vmdk (OSX.vmdk) and a copy of the physical partition vmdk as made by vmware (OSX-3.vmdk) with just the mac partition (disk0s3) enabled. disk0.guids is the output from the ruby script posted on the other guid instructions page.

 

Thanks,

Andrew

 

edit: another possibility is just wait for grub2 to fix snow leopard support and just use it to boot the mac partition, i can make it ignore the mbr no worries, force it to load chameleon boot file directly. http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...189079&st=0

OSX_vmdk.zip

[Donk]

Hmm, it hadn't even occurred to me that macdrive might change the guid's as well as the mbr, do you know any windows utilities that would print out the current gpt layout as visible to windows?

 

I tried willmo's guid technique from that other page again using the vmware created xxx-pt.vmdk as the mbr.vmdk component of the hand made vmdk file and vmware doesn't complain about the mbr being changed now, but I just got an Operating System Not Found from vmware, which could mean a messed up gpt or a mistake elsewhere. I also tried this with your darwin.iso set to the cd and can get the darwin bootloader up, but I'm back to it only seeing the windows partition, I assume it's working from the mbr not the gpt. If I could get a bootloader on a cd image that uses gpt and ignores mbr, and feed it the gpt as per willmo's guide, then it might work.

 

Either way I've attached a copy of both the hand made vmdk (OSX.vmdk) and a copy of the physical partition vmdk as made by vmware (OSX-3.vmdk) with just the mac partition (disk0s3) enabled. disk0.guids is the output from the ruby script posted on the other guid instructions page.

 

Thanks,

Andrew

 

edit: another possibility is just wait for grub2 to fix snow leopard support and just use it to boot the mac partition, i can make it ignore the mbr no worries, force it to load chameleon boot file directly. http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...189079&st=0

 

Not to be awkward but please go and read the manual and the details on the other thread. You need to configure VMware to load a Mac OS X OS, you cannot simply point it at the darwin.iso I made, it needs to be properly installed and signed.

 

As for dumping the GPT I thought DIskPart could do it.

 

 

I will take a look at the files later, as busy at work.

[Corona]

Sorry I hadn't been right through your install process simply because I have a working osx-in-vmware so long as my partition type is left as 0xaf, it boots just fine without modifying anything in the vmware workstation folder so I'd avoided that in case it stopped working.

That being said I see the advantage to having it installed properly so have just done that now, and sure enough I don't need your iso attached to the cd, I get darwin bootloader just fine. Same situation though in that it can't see my mac drive. I'll keep playing with ideas and see if I can make something work.

 

I'd played with diskpart in the past and couldn't seem to find anywhere to get gpt guid information on the partitions, it'll make new ones sure but any of the get info style stuff gives partition type from mbr but no guids to check. Now that I think of it though one partition information command did list the type as 0x07 but down below it identified it as HFSJ - at the time I assumed it was macdrive's driver reporting it as such but perhaps it's reading a (valid) guid and decoding it to that.

 

Thanks for your hard work and time,

Andrew