Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on VMware. (Win7)

Interested to try OSX out on your PC without all the other ‘hassles’ of partitioning and having a configured bootloader? Got random mac partitioned HDDs you need to grab data off from (I fall into this category)? Just follow these easy steps below to get Snow Leopard on your PC.

Pre-reqs

-PC with an intel processor, virtualisation might be required, I used a q6600 without problems.

-VMware installed (I used version 7)

-Retail copy of 10.6 (I don’t encourage torrenting)

-Downloaded a pre-made modified version of Snow Leopard.vmdk and darwin_snow.iso, basically a pre-made version of the virtual machine. Get it here.

Steps

-Start VMware and open the vmx file you’ve downloaded (and extracted). Edit the virtual machine settings to use darwin_snow.iso on the DVD drive.

-You can edit the other memory/processor settings to improve performance, else proceed to power on the virtual machine and quickly hit F8, which should now enable a boot menu.

-Before proceeding, point the virtual machine (again under virtual machine settings) to the OSX retail DVD instaed of darwin_snow.iso.

-Now select the C option (boot DVD) and the grey apple boot screen should show.

-Wait a little for the installation setup to show. Complete the Installation.


-After it’s done, point the DVD drive back to darwin_snow.iso and boot up the machine.

You should now have Mac OSX working =p. It does suck a fair amount of system resources, I have it set at 2GB of ram and to use all 4 cores of my proc, even then it still does take awhile to bootup.