Install OS X in VirtualBox on iMac?
These instructions are for VirtualBox on Windows and Linux but they work well on OS X as well. Taken from here -- abridged and modified for OS X guest OS:
- Rip your original retail DVD of Snow Leopard in ISO format.
- In VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine. Name it as you want, but select "Mac OS X" as the operating system, and "Mac OS X Server" as the version. Click next. Assign a good amount of RAM to the VM. I chose 1024 MB. Click next. Create a new virtual hard disk, I chose 20 GB of dynamically expanding storage. Click finish.
- Open the settings for this new virtual machine, and in the Storage section, load the Snow Leopard ISO in the now empty CD/DVD device.
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Now close VirtualBox (important!). Find the XML file that defines the virtual machine that you just created. This will be in
~/Library/VirtualBox/Machines/<name of the VM>/<name of the VM>.xml. Search this file in a text edit for theExtraDataItemtags. After the last instance ofExtraDataItemtags add the following two, new,ExtraDataItemtags:<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/EfiBootArgs" value=" "/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/SmcDeviceKey" value="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"/>
Save and close the file.
Open VirtualBox and power on the virtual machine. The installation will start after some minutes. Choose your language. Now open Disk Utility under Utilities menu. Select the virtual disk and click Erase. Close it and you can now install OSX. Before that, you can choose to customize the installation. It can be interesting to disable extra language translations or printer support (you save about 2 GB).
I have a SL 10.6.8 VBox running as we speak. It works perfectly, if a bit slowly. I'm about to abandon it for reasons totally unrelated to VirtualBox, but let's see if I can remember everything I did to get it running:
1) Like the other answer said, start with a rip of an original SL DVD. Mine was 10.6.0.
2) Also like the other answer, create the new VM, select Mac OS X Server (even if you're not using Server), assign >= 1GB of RAM (I'd give it at least 2GB if you can spare it), and mount your ripped DVD.
3) Don't start the machine.
4) Open up the machine settings and make sure all of the following are set:
System > Motherboard > Chipset: ICH9
System > Motherboard > Extended Features > Enable IO APIC (checked)
System > Motherboard > Extended Features > Enable EFI (checked)
System > Processor > Enable PAE/NX (checked)
System > Acceleration > Enable VT-x/AMD-V (checked)
System > Acceleration > Enable Nested Paging (checked)
Storage > Here make sure the hard disk is attached to a SATA Controller of type AHCI.
Network > Adapter 1 (or any other) > Adapter Type: Intel PRO/1000 T Server (82543GC)
Ports > Serial Ports > Enable Serial Port (uncheck this)
Ports > USB > Enable USB Controller (checked)
Ports > USB > Enable USB 2.0 (checked)
5) Start the machine and you should see the verbose boot mode (no gray Apple screen).
6) Proceed with OS X install.
This is exactly what I did and have running now. Updated 10.6.0 to 10.6.8 using standard Software Update. No patches, kexts or other hacks required.
My System: iMac 21.5" Late 2009 (3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 16GB RAM)
VirtualBox version: 4.1.12 r77245 with extensions installed.
I tried updating VirtualBox to 4.1.14, but that broke this VM somehow. Never quite figured out why, but that kept me from updating. Haven't tried 4.1.16 yet. If you can't it to install on the current version with these settings, maybe this is why?
Hope that helps!