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geerlingguy / macos-virtualbox-vm

Instructions and script to help you create a VirtualBox VM running macOS.
MIT License
2.55k stars 314 forks source link

virtualize installed copy #43

Closed apple-corps closed 5 years ago

apple-corps commented 6 years ago

I had a friend run the installed copy of windows inside a VM from linux running on the same machine. I see some value in this. Have you tried this and if so it might be nice to provide an example.

geerlingguy commented 5 years ago

I'm not quite sure what's being asked here; are you saying can you run windows inside VirtualBox? Or macOS on Linux?

ts-toh commented 5 years ago

@geerlingguy what I believe he is asking is if you can you run as a vm, an installed non-virtualized os in another partition. VMWare Fusion lets you boot windows or linux directly from your bootcamp partition, so that if you need to run something from it, you don't have to actually reboot.

The answer is probably, but it might not be simple. I have done this with everything but OSX. It usually involves manually creating a special vmdk file that points to the physical partition, and remaps certain values for the VM.

@drocsid If you don't need to have two boot entry points for your OSX installation though, OSX is way easier to virtualize. Just start VirtualBox, and instead of installing, just use Disk Utility to Restore from the system you want to virtualize. I do it with all of my old OSX machines.

geerlingguy commented 5 years ago

Ah yeah... doing that with macOS may be nigh impossible. And I definitely don't think I'd have the inclination to support that usage pattern in this project.