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Last active June 10, 2024 14:35
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Installing Snow Leopard in VMware Fusion
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SnowLeopardFusion.md

  • Patch the Fusion EFI boot ROMs

  • Fusion blocks the use of regular 10.6 (not server) in the EFI ROM. To work around this, patch it using the EFI unlocker from GitHub. Uncompress in your downloads folder. Open the Terminal and run the following two commands:

 cd /Users/$USER/Downloads/efi-unlocker-master
./efi-macos.sh

  • If the command succeeds, you should have two new files, EFI32-MACOS.ROM and EFI64-MACOS.ROM in the efi-unlocker-master folder.

  • Modify the VM configuration

  • To make your VM use the modified ROMs:

  • Navigate to Documents -> Virtual Machines in the Finder Right click the Snow Leopard VM, selecting Show Package Contents Copy the two EFI ROM files from the unlocker folder to this folder:

/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/

Rename the original files:

sudo mv /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI32.ROM /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI32.ROM.bac
sudo mv /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI64.ROM /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI64.ROM.bac
  • Rename the patched ROMS
sudo mv /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI32-MACOS.ROM /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI32.ROM
sudo mv /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI64-MACOS.ROM /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/roms/x86_x64/EFI64.ROM
  • Install any version of Mavericks, Yosemite or El Capitan in VMware.
  • Add another hard drive to the virtual machine.
  • Restore this DMG to the newly created drive.
  • Add this line to the .vmx file:
cpuid.1.eax = “0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101”
  • Remove the line that has sound.virtualDev = “hdaudio” Save the file and quit Textedit
  • Modify the Hardware version to 19 virtualhw.version = "19"
  • Set the startup disk to Snow Leopard
  • Install DarwinPre15.iso
  • You can always extract it from latest version here inside:
~/Downloads/com.vmware.fusion.zip/com.vmware.fusion/payload/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/isoimages/x86_x64/darwinPre15.iso
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