UPDATE: OSX on Fusion VM

I won’t fully apolgize for saying I wanted to punch Apple. Mainly, this is made much harder than it needs to be. If this doesn’t make sense read my previous rant about getting the install image for OSX Mountain Lion to run a VM legally and licensed on my Mac Mini purchased with Mountain Lion pre-installed.

In that article I cite an article that ended up having the answer if I would just follow the intructions. Go there I will re-describe here with the steps to getting the image installed in Fusion.

Get the BaseSystem.dmg

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First we are going to mount the Apple_Boot Recoery HD. The attach the baseSystem.dmg image as a drive.

From the list we now enter:

>diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk0s3
and
>hdutil attach "/Volumes/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSystem.dmg"

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The result of the hdutil attach command opens this window in finder. This is where I got it all wrong. Instead of following the directions I thought. Well instead of copying everyting in the download and force quiting like the instructions. I will just get the VM to boot from the BaseSystem.dmg. This seemed to be working fine.

On a side note. The BaseSystem.dmg is invisible in finder. From the CLI you can see it and make a copy from the Recovery HD to your main partition. If you want to be able to actually view the file use the command for the CLI:
>chflags nohidden ./BaseSystem.dmg
All this will do is get you this error during the install process with the menacing eyes of the Mountain Lion and the barely QA’d error message saying you didn’t buy Lion. No duh I didn’t buy Lion my mac CAME WITH Mountain Lion. Oh well I digress.

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Back to instructions that will actually help you.

Install OSX Mountain Lion

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Show All Disks

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Use your handy EMC Elect 64GB USB drive

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Seriously my 8GB USB was too small the next size up I own is 64GB (thanks @mjbrender)

Now we wait – then Force QUIT

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So with a large enough USB drive you click install. The installer will now download 4+GB of installtion files into a InstallESD.dmg image on that USB drive. Now you have to read carefully. You must Force Quit when the installer is finished downloading and ready to reboot. Don’t Reboot. ALT + right click (or two finger’d, whatever). If you just normally quit the app in the dock it will clean itself up and delete the InstallESD.dmg file. Some reported seeing the file in the “Trash” after a normal quit, that just not how I roll. Force that junk!

Now copy that file somewhere else for fusion install.

 

The USB drive in Finder

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In Fusion create a new VM

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I am using Fusion 5 so this probably won’t work in previous versions with OSX 10.8
Click Continue without disc.

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Choose a disc or disc image…

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Now select the InstallESD.dmg image. Now Fusion will detect that you are installing Mac OSX 10.8 and roll on. Amazingly enough now it does not ask for your AppleID to verify the installation was purchased from the App Store.

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Install the VMware tools and now you have a happy little OSX VM.

Turning rant back on:
I started messing with this morning and now it is 3:45pm. Thanks for taking a Saturday Apple. Urgh.

This makes me want to punch Apple – OS X in a VM

UPDATE: I found a fix and posted now.

I purchased a Mac Mini.
It has 16 GB of Memory. So why not run a VM for dev purposes. Not so fast my friend, as Lee Corso would say.

The official VMware Fusion KB says use the app you downloaded from the App Store.

So what if I purchased OSX Mountain Lion pre-installed on my mac?
The mac centric forums seem to be no help since those users seem to have no concept of a VM.

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I sure won’t buy it twice. Since I already laid down money for it once.

Then I found this article on how to get the image from the recovery partition.
With a few tweeks I was able to boot the VM in Fusion and I though I was home free. Until I was told to enter my Apple ID and quickly rejected since I did not purchase Lion. Not to mention the MOUNTAIN Lion looking at me like, “take that! Punch in the gut straight from Steve Jobs.”

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Whatever, time to install Ubuntu Desktop or something.

Serious though if you got this to work somehow please let me know.