Abstract As a network and security architect, I sometimes need to test security and network policies using different OS. A virtual machine can help but what if you need to test policies against physical hardware?
I have a 250GB SSD, and I’m going to allocate:. 50GB for OS X. 50GB for Windows. 150GB for Ubuntu Linux 16.04, my preferred OS I made lot of tests to make everything working fine, so be sure you follow the steps below carefully.
MacBook Air models running Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' or Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' are capable of running a great deal of Mac software written for Intel-based Macs and the vast majority of Mac OS X applications written for PowerPC-based systems using the 'Rosetta Universal Binary Translator'. If you’re interested in installing Windows 10 on your Mac’s internal drive, you can easily do so by means of Microsoft’s Windows 10 ISO download and the macOS Boot Camp Assistant.
Mind that you’ll need three USB keys:. Windows 10 installation. Windows 10 recovery. Ubuntu 16.04 installation Install or prepare OS X If you have a OSX installed on a single partition, filling the whole disk, go to the next step below in this paragraph.
Otherwise, I suggest to reinstall OS X:. power off your Mac;. keep pressing command + R while you power on your Mac (release when the apple disappear) and boot into macOS Recovery mode;. OS X Utilities will be loaded:. open Disk Utility, select your main disk and press erase (do that more than once, if first attempt fails);. name your new partition OSX;. quit Disk Utility;.
open Install OS X and install it. When installation is completed, consider to upgrade your OS X to latest version. After that:.;.;.;.
and unpack it;. open BootCamp and prepare the first USB key for Windows installation media;.
start UNetbootin and prepare also the second USB key for Ubuntu installation media;. download refind and unpack it;.
open Disk Utility;. create another partition, leaving 50GB for OS X partition;. power off your Mac.
Install Windows At the end of this section, you will have a dual boot Mac: OS X and Windows 10. You can boot one OS using Startup Manager or via Boot Camp.
Let’s begin:. insert the Windows installation USB key;. power on holding option/alt to open the Startup Manager;.
boot from Windows installation USB key;. in the disk manager, remove the non OS X partition (remove the second one, the bigger one);. create a new 50GB partition and install Windows on it;.
be sure Boot Camp package is installed too (it contains Mac drivers for Windows);. create a Windows USB recovery drive;. power off your Mac. Installing ReFind At the end of this section, we’ll install a new bootloader to better manage a multi OS Mac.
Let’s begin:. keep pressing command + R while you power on your Mac (release when the apple disappear) and boot into macOS Recovery mode;. OS X Utilities will be loaded;. open Disk Utility and mount OS X partition; Image. quit Disk Utility;. open a terminal and install rEFInd (continue even if you got a warning). # cd /Volumes/OSX/Users/andrea/Destkop/refind-0.10.2 #./refind-install.
power off your Mac. Install Ubuntu Linux At the end of this section, you will have a dual boot Mac: OS X and Ubuntu Linux 16.04. Windows 10 will be broken by Ubuntu installation. Let’s begin:. insert the Ubuntu installation USB key;. power on holding option/alt to open the Startup Manager;. boot from Ubuntu installation USB key;.
install Ubuntu using the free space (about 150GB);. power off your Mac. Fixing Windows 10 boot (0xc000000e error) After Ubuntu installation, Windows 10 won’t boot anymore. Boot will will fail with 0xc000000e error. Fixing that was the hardest part of this journey. Let’s see how to fix it:. power on your Mac and boot Ubuntu;.
login, open a shell with administrative privileges;. edit /boot/efi/EFI/refind/refind.conf and include gptsync.
Showtools shell, gdisk, memtest, moktool, applerecovery, windowsrecovery, about, reboot, exit, firmware, fwupdate, gptsync. reboot your Mac and select Hybrid MBR tool ( gptsync) from rEFInd boot loader;. gptsync should detect four partitions:. EFI PRotective. NTFS/HPFS.
Linux. Linux swap / Solaris. confirm gptsync you want to sync MBR and GPT;. power off your Mac;. insert the Windows USB recovery drive;.
power on holding option/alt to open the Startup Manager;. boot from Windows USB recovery drive;. open a command prompt and type.
I’ve never been a Mac fan, but I do have to say that our family does have several Apple products in our home, 2 iPads and an iPhone for the kids and my wife. Whether I like to admit it or not they do make a highly polished quality product. It had been an interest of mine recently to run Mac OS X on my powerhouse PC at home, but I wanted it to run as virtual machine.
I raked over some sites that stated it was not possible, I found that rather funny I mean how is it not possible doesn’t Mac run on Intel hardware nowadays anyhow? Then I stumbled on this. It does a good job at showing the basic steps, however it doesn’t explain much along the way, I figured it would be good to break this down and explain it. Download this (approx. 6 GB), within this file is a file called Yosemite 10.10 Retail VMware.rar, this needs to be extracted to a location of your choice, preferably onto a SSD.
This rar file contains VMware prepped OS X files (vmx, vmdk) for use with VMware products. Install VMware Workstation or VMware Player, I chose the Workstation route since I already had it installed. Confirm VMware Workstation or VMware Player is installed correctly, and close the program.
Download the latest, at the time of writing it is. Extract the contents of OS X Unlocker onto your computer. OS X Unlocker essentially patches the installed VMware product so Mac OS X can be installed.
It does this modifying some core VMware system files. Browse to the folder where you extracted OS X Unlocker and Run the following files As Administrator ( win-install.cmd and win-update-tools.cmd) Note: if something goes wrong or you’d like to restore the original files for your VMware application you can run win-uninstall.cmd. Run VMware Workstation or VMware Player and select Open a Virtual Machine. Select the Mac OS X 10.9.vmx file and select Open. Go to Edit virtual machine settings.
Either by right clicking on the Mac OS X 10.9 object on the left side panel or via the tabbed window. You can keep the default resources if you prefer or bump them up, I personally bumped them up to 8 GB and 2 vCPU.
The important option here is Version which is on the Options tab. This needs to be set to Mac OS X 10.7.
This option is not available by default, the OS X Unlocker we ran earlier has exposed this option. If for some reason you don’t see this option, look at re-running the OS X Unlocker steps, it needs to be Run as Administrator. Now power on the Virtual Machine using Power on this virtual machine or by right clicking and going to Power Start Up Guest. The machine will boot up and take you through the OS X setup process, it’s very quick and painless. Once complete it’s now time to install the latest VMware Tools onto the newly created OS X VM. You may have picked up on it when we ran win-update-tools.cmd for OS X Unlocker it pulled down the latest and greatest for us to mount and install.
Right click on the Mac OS X 10.9 VM on the left side and go to Settings. Go to CD/DVD and go to Browse and mount the darwin.iso file. Make sure Connected is checked!. The VMware Tools installer should pop right up, just click Install VMware Tools and then reboot upon completion. If you want to take it a step further to improve the VM performance there is tool called BeamOff which is included in this file we downloaded in step 1. This tool disables beam synchronization which in turn improves OS X VM performance. Mount the Beamoff Tool.iso similarly to VMware Tools in the step previous.
Alternately you can download zip and do this yourself if you prefer. Extract the BeamOff application to somewhere on your VM. Go to System Preferences. Go to Users & Groups. Click on your User account and select Login Items, click the + and browse and select beamoff. At the time of this writing OS X El Capitan is now available, if you want to apply it, go fetch the update from the App Store and install it!
Hopefully you found this informative, I found it interesting and thought I should share my experience.