Click until you get to the screen where it asks which hard disk you want to install to. Snow Leopard Server Install will start up. If you want it to be larger than the default which Parallels created, either edit it, or just delete the drive and add back a new one.

This will be your Snow Leopard virtual HD.

Add another virtual CD/DVD drive, and assign the standard Snow Leopard disk image to it.

Click on CD/DVD and assign the Snow Leopard Server disk image to it.

In the configuration window, click on Hardware.

Choose “Continue Without Disc” and then choose “Mac OS X Server 10.6” as the type of virtual machine, and select “Customize Settings Before Installation”.

Use Disk Utility to make disk image files from both the Server DVD and the standard Mac OS X DVD.

I am not a lawyer, I am not responsible for anything that happens, etc, etc.) Since the release of Lion, it’s now a murky area as to whether doing this is kosher per Apple’s EULA.

(Keep in mind that it’s only me, Ivan Drucker, and not IvanExpert the company, explaining how to do this, and I’m not recommending it. I’ll explain the first way here, and the second way tomorrow. (This might apply if your license key expires after a certain date, or is already in use on another machine you won’t actually be installing Snow Leopard Server.) The other way requires only a regular Snow Leopard DVD, but also needs an 8 GB flash drive and it takes longer. One method is faster, but requires a Snow Leopard Server install disc, though not a license key for it. They have been tested with Parallels Desktop 6 but ought to work equally well in VMWare Fusion or Oracle VirtualBox. Another person figured out that if you installed Snow Leopard Server first, and from there installed standard Snow Leopard, that would work but what I wanted was not have to install Snow Leopard Server first, or in fact need it at all. So the trick is to figure out how to get Snow Leopard into a Parallels virtual HD (.hdd file). Parallels only lets you install the Server version of Snow Leopard.īut a while ago someone figured out that if you can get a Snow Leopard installation into a virtual HD, and create an empty file called /System/Library/CoreServices/ist, it would boot. So having Snow Leopard around would allow you to continue to use these older applications. However, there’s now a very good reason to want to run Snow Leopard in a VM: Lion doesn’t support PowerPC applications. In Snow Leopard, only the Server version was permitted to be virtualized. One bit of under-the-radar good news in Lion is that Apple has changed the licensing terms of their End User License Agreement: they now permit you to run Mac OS X, either the regular or Server version, on up to two virtual machines, as long as they are running on Mac hardware. I’ll be taking a closer look at some point. Commenters have reported that it doesn’t work on Parallels Desktop 7. Update: The below was tested on Parallels Desktop 6.

Virtualbox for mac 10.6 8