Tag: Virtual Machine

Running Mac OS X in Windows 8

Matthew LeibowitzLeave a comment

Have you ever wanted or needed to run OS X on your Windows PC? I certainly did. As I am a developer of multiple platforms, Android, iOS and Windows, I would like to use one device to develop for all platforms, and of course using Visual Studio.

In order to install Mac OS X in VMWare on a PC, there are a few things that are needed:

  1. the OS X operating system (from an existing Mac)
  2. a Windows machine
  3. UniBeast
  4. VMWare Workstation
  5. Hackintosh VMWare Template for OS X

Now to get started, we have to get the OS X from the physical Mac. The first thing that we are going to do is prepare a bootable USB drive that we will use to install the OS on the VM.
In order to do this, there are a few steps (in order to do anything, we need to make sure that we have downloaded OS Mavericks from the App Store):

  1. Insert a USB Drive of at least 8GB
  2. Use Disk Utility:
    1. Choose USB Drive
    2. Choose Partition (Partition Layout: 1 partition)
    3. Under options choose Master Boot Record
    4. Choose Format (Mac OS Extended (Journaled))
    5. Click Apply
  3. Use UniBeast
    1. Download UniBeast
    2. Run Unibeast
    3. Choose USB Drive
    4. Select Mavericks 10.9
    5. Continue – This takes a while (not less than a minute)

Once we have done this, we should have a bootable USB drive containing Mavericks. Now we need to prepare our Windows machine. As there can only be one instance of hypervisor running, we may have to disable Hyper-V. If you don’t have Hyper-V installed, you can skip this step.

In order to disable Hyper-V, we are going to create a boot profile that will start up our PC without Hyper-V.
The first thing we need to do is to create a copy of our current boot profile. From the command line, execute this command:

    bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Disable Hyper-V"

This command creates a copy of our current profile {current} and creates a new profile with the name Disable Hyper-V. This name could be anything we like. This command will return a GUID that we are going to use in the next step to disable Hyper-V:

    bcdedit /set {INSERT-GUID-HERE} hypervisorlaunchtype off

This command disables Hyper-V for the profile with the GUID {INSERT-GUID-HERE} from the previous command.

If we restart our computer now, we should be presented with two options: “Windows 8.1” and “Disable Hyper-V”. Everytime we wish to use VMWare, we need to start with the “Disable Hyper-V” profile. This profile is exactly the same as the “normal” profile, just without Hyper-V, so you can use this profile for typical development as well.

The next thing to do is install VMWare:

  1. Install VMWare Workstation 10
    (the free VMWare Player will work as well to playback VMs)
  2. Install Hackintosh Template for OS X
  3. Create a Virtual Machine with Workstation 10 Compatibility hardware
  4. Install Operating System Later
  5. Choose OSX 10.9
  6. Add desired Hardware with at least 40 GB disk space allocated to the Virtual Hard Disk.
  7. Run NAT preferably
  8. Insert USB Boot Drive Created on Mac into PC
  9. Boot Virtual Machine
  10. Under VM > Removable Disks > Connect the USB Drive
    (this will remove it from visibility to Windows Host)
  11. Reset the VM
  12. OS X should install

That’s it! You should now have Mac OS X running on your PC!