i’ve got a shiney new mac, but I want to use virtual box to run my old mac on(running 10.4, with old versions of abdobe CS3 and Quark on it, I know, don’t ask!).

Anyhow, I’ve got a disk image of my old mac backed up using CCCloner.

Which is all fine, I’ve used this before to restore the mac when the hdd failed, so the image works perferctly fine.

Can I restore this image to virtual box so i can access the old software? Is it possible? (Just wanting an answer to that before I go further googling on the how too, doesn’t seem obvious that I can use this type of image with Vbox.)

the image I’ve got is a .sparseimage

Running Mac guests on VirtuaBox is hard. It’s not really designed for that type of scenario, I’m afraid.

Rachel

what’s hard about it? is there better vm software?

i managed to get os x running on my pc on virtual box yonks ago, but it was rubbish to use.

I use a Parallels Virtual Machine to run Snow Leopard Server for one specific piece of software. I just did a clean install though, rather than using an old backup. Not sure if that’s possible (obviously doesn’t help you if you haven’t got the relevant installation files you need!)

yeah I could do a clean install, don’t really want to though! Hence wanting to go down the restoring this image route.

just Googled & found this:

It’s actually very simple.

1. Backup the physical machine’s disk into sparsebundle (i.e. the machine you want to convert to a VM)
2. Create a new/blank VM within VMware/Parallels
3. Add a 2nd disk to the new VM (big enough to fit the size of the source machine)
4. Use SuperDuper! or CCC to restore the sparsebundle image to the 2nd disk
5. Reconfigure the VM to boot from the 2nd disk (I had to delete my 1st disk since Parallels kept connecting to it even though it was set to be discommented).

As per the comments in the blog you may have to reconfigure the VMs specific OS X version if the new VM doesn’t match the source machine.

cheers zolig, I think I can follow that, will give it a go.

Not something I’d have thought of myself but it sounds plausible! Let us know if it works, could be a useful trick!

No joy. Would have worked with a more relevant os as it looks like it tried to boot. But 10.4, nah on to plumbs.

Solution,

Just leave old machine running and remote login to it via teamviewer, need to install version 7 though for 10.4 and it’s a bit laggy, but it works! 🙂

I seem to recall that there is an issue running older versions of Mac OS in a VM environment. VMware Fusion for example will allow you to create OS X VM’s for anything back to 10.7 … but 10.6 and 10.5 need to be the specific server versions of Mac OS, I’ve tried to restore a 10.5 desktop image to a VM and the hypervisor flat out refuses to run it. Not sure if this is a technical limitation, more likely it’s something in Apple’s EULA that means VMware coded out support.

Rachel’s post earlier is spot on though, VirtualBox doesn’t offer support for Mac OS as a guest machine only as a host… only Windows / Linux are supported guests on Mac OS hosts. Something like Fusion or Parallels likely to be better but still no go for your 10.4 OS image I’d suggest.