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:
- the OS X operating system (from an existing Mac)
- a Windows machine
- UniBeast
- VMWare Workstation
- 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):
- Insert a USB Drive of at least 8GB
- Use Disk Utility:
- Choose USB Drive
- Choose Partition (Partition Layout: 1 partition)
- Under options choose Master Boot Record
- Choose Format (Mac OS Extended (Journaled))
- Click Apply
- Use UniBeast
- Download UniBeast
- Run Unibeast
- Choose USB Drive
- Select Mavericks 10.9
- 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:
- Install VMWare Workstation 10
(the free VMWare Player will work as well to playback VMs) - Install Hackintosh Template for OS X
- Create a Virtual Machine with Workstation 10 Compatibility hardware
- Install Operating System Later
- Choose OSX 10.9
- Add desired Hardware with at least 40 GB disk space allocated to the Virtual Hard Disk.
- Run NAT preferably
- Insert USB Boot Drive Created on Mac into PC
- Boot Virtual Machine
- Under VM > Removable Disks > Connect the USB Drive
(this will remove it from visibility to Windows Host) - Reset the VM
- OS X should install
That’s it! You should now have Mac OS X running on your PC!