• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

Can I access a real Mac hard drive in VirtualBox?

M

MikeTyson

Joined
Dec 9, 2009
Messages
646 (0.11/day)
Location
South East, United Kingdom
System Specs
System Name Swag
Processor Intel Xeon E3110 4GHz
Motherboard GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L
Cooling Scythe Infinity I Push-Pull w/ AS5
Memory 2x2GB Transcend 800MHz DDR2 @ 890MHz 1.9v
Video Card(s) Palit nVIDIA GTX460 1GB 800/1600/2000
Storage Crucial M4 64GB
Display(s) LG Flatron M1917TM 1280x1024 @ 60Hz
Audio Device(s) Realtek HD Audio
Power Supply OCZ StealthXStream 2 600W
Software Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Basics, I've taken out my hard drive from a MacBook Pro with a legit copy of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and iLife 2009 etc... it worked perfectly in the MacBook pro so don't ask why I took it out, I just did okay?

Can I use VirtualBox to boot from this Mac hard drive? and run a sort of "Virtual MacBook Pro"?
 
No, it is hardware based that prevents the mac from running on regular pc.
 
theoretically yes... but in practice things don't always work as they "should"

the positive is it's osx, built on unix - not so dependent on specific first-install drivers like windows.

edit: that used to be the case freak, with ppc - but you don't hear much of ppc macs lately and intel ones are not hardware restricted like they were in the past. sure they are still limited, but not by the ppc vs x86 architecture anymore.

i'm gonna say intel mac - am quite sure 10.6 doesn't work with ppc, they stopped at 10.4. so hardware will not prevent it. unfortunately i still can't say yes for sure - am definitely interested though.
 
MikeTyson said:
Can I use VirtualBox to boot from this Mac hard drive? and run a sort of "Virtual MacBook Pro"?
Click to expand...

no. virtualbox does not work that way.
 
Easy Rhino said:
no. virtualbox does not work that way.
Click to expand...

i assumed he meant after loading the base OS, not as in replacing it. does it(virtualbox) not boot OS images?
 
digibucc said:
i assumed he meant after loading the base OS, not as in replacing it. does it(virtualbox) not boot OS images?
Click to expand...

he wants to use virtualbox to boot from a mac hdd. you cant boot from a hdd using virtualbox. you set virtualbox up on a host machine and then create virtual machines and then load up isos onto them. at least that is what i think he wanted.
 
Easy Rhino said:
he wants to use virtualbox to boot from a mac hdd. you cant boot from a hdd using virtualbox. you set virtualbox up on a host machine and then create virtual machines and then load up isos onto them. at least that is what i think he wanted.
Click to expand...

ahhh misunderstood.

but now my question: could he image the hard drive and run it as a virtual machine?
the format of the image would matter of course, but are Virtual OS images and actual OS installs much different?
 
digibucc said:
ahhh misunderstood.

but now my question: could he image the hard drive and run it as a virtual machine?
the format of the image would matter of course, but are Virtual OS images and actual OS installs much different?
Click to expand...

i dont know if it would work.
 
good discussion guys, i especially like the one about imaging the hard drive and then booting it

i have a spare hard drive i can image it onto from my windows computer? if someone could explain how i could go about booting the image or what software to use i'd love to hear it, as this isn#'t just some random project... it's actually pretty important (:

thanks fo rthe advice so far ^_^
 
well imaging a drive is creating a file, like a .zip, that holds everything the drive had on it. the thing is idk what image format to start with, and that alone could make or break the project.

you should be searching google for p2v or physical-to-virtual
http://canned-os.blogspot.com/2006/08/p2v-virtualizing-existing-os-install.html

i don't actually know anything, just guessing and searching myself.
 
This is going to be harder to get working than you realize. As someone who years ago built a Hackintosh, it takes a lot of work to get a Mac OS X installation working from scratch on generic X86 hardware. It's probably just as difficult getting it to work in a virtual X86 environment.

Maybe you should think about getting a copy of one of the pre-built OSX86 installations and install that on your machine? Even though this route would be less difficult, I have a feeling that it's still probably more than you want to mess with.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

"'m gonna say intel mac - am quite sure 10.6 doesn't work with ppc, they stopped at 10.4. "
Click to expand...

Leopard (10.5) is PPC and Intel compatible. It required a 867+ Mhz processor. Snow Leopard (10.6) is Intel compatible, it has no PPC compatibility.
 
Last edited:
I'm pretty sure it's illegal to run OS X on anything but a mac. That being said-
http://lifehacker.com/5583650/run-mac-os-x-in-virtualbox-on-windows (OSx86... not exactly OSX)

Currently I run OS X in VMware using Empire EFI and it runs pretty swell. Unfortunately there isn't really much support for audio or video so it runs slow but it's incredibly useful for testing software/websites/etc. (especially when you're programming in Qt or SDL).

I'm currently running VirtualBox version 3.2.8 and in the manual's section 9.7.1.1 there are detailed instructions on using physical HDDs. You'd have to either image the drive (which I'd recommend) or use your physical drive then combine some of the instructions I posted and use Empire EFI to get it to boot (and I'm betting it still won't work)... Not worth the trouble IMO
 
Last edited:
streetfighter 2 said:
I'm pretty sure it's illegal to run OS X on anything but a mac. That being said-
http://lifehacker.com/5583650/run-mac-os-x-in-virtualbox-on-windows (OSx86... not exactly OSX)

Currently I run OS X in VMware using Empire EFI and it runs pretty swell. Unfortunately there isn't really much support for audio or video so it runs slow but it's incredibly useful for testing software/websites/etc. (especially when you're programming in Qt or SDL).

I'm currently running VirtualBox version 3.2.8 and in the manual's section 9.7.1.1 there are detailed instructions on using physical HDDs. You'd have to either image the drive (which I'd recommend) or use your physical drive then combine some of the instructions I posted and use Empire EFI to get it to boot (and I'm betting it still won't work)... Not worth the trouble IMO
Click to expand...

Sounds awesome, thanks (: I'll try to take a look ^_^

Sooo if I do image the drive, how do I go about making it boot in VirtualBox? And what software do I use to image it in the first place? I took the drive to an Apple store the other day and they booted into it using a MacBook Pro with an external hard disk cradle and it worked flawlessly, so the drive itself is fine... I just need a way of booting it (:

THanks again for the advice so far guys, thanks will be handed out when everything is cushty ^_^
 
Well you need a .vdi file generated from a RAW disk.

To accomplish this I'd use the linux utility "dd" which is incredibly useful when working with virtual machines and disks (but there are several alternatives). It's very powerful so be careful that you don't accidentally run it on the wrong drive (as it will delete it!!).

Here's a small (incredibly small) tutorial:
http://grantmcwilliams.com/tech/virtualization/virt-blog/184-convert-raw-disk-images-to-vdi-format

The two commands:
dd if=/dev/hda of=./hda.img
VBoxManage convertdd hda.img hda.vdi
Click to expand...
The location "/dev/hda" may be different when you're running linux and if you're not sure try running "df -h" to list your HDDs.

If you don't have a system with linux installed you can use a live CD but you'll need two HDDs. One that is big enough to hold the "hda.img" and "hda.vdi" files and your original OS X HDD.

If you're not at least casually acquainted with Linux I'd recommend getting help from one of your friend's who is.

You'll may also need a copy of the Empire EFI disc image which you'll load into the virtual CD-ROM drive so that it is executed as the first boot device in the virtual machine. VirtualBox does have an option for EFI that may work but I've never tried it.

As I said earlier, even if you do all the right things I sincerely doubt you'll get it running in VirtualBox.
 
Last edited:
MikeTyson said:
Basics, I've taken out my hard drive from a MacBook Pro with a legit copy of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and iLife 2009 etc... it worked perfectly in the MacBook pro so don't ask why I took it out, I just did okay?

Can I use VirtualBox to boot from this Mac hard drive? and run a sort of "Virtual MacBook Pro"?
Click to expand...

Your sig rig will easily work as a Hackintosh, you just need to make a bootable usb stick or a cd with Chameleon. One of those can boot up your hard disk.
 
mm67 said:
Your sig rig will easily work as a Hackintosh, you just need to make a bootable usb stick or a cd with Chameleon. One of those can boot up your hard disk.
Click to expand...

Please explain in more detail :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top