If Hackintosh is not new to you, you will have no problem to follow along with this guide. If you are new to this “Hackintosh” thing, don’t worry this isn’t the real Hackintosh and installing on a Virtual Machine meaning it doesn’t matter what you do, you can always recover or start from scratch again without damaging your perfectly working Windows 7 environment.
To start, here are the following tools and items you need to have:
- VMware Workstation 7.1+ (get the latest version) or even better free version of VMware Player will work as well
- After many readers’ respond, it looks like it’s a good idea to download and install VMware Workstation
even with a free trail, for initial setups. Afterwards you can use VMware Player to run the VM.
- Download the Mac OS X VMware unlocker Mac OS X VMware unlocker mirror1, mirror2and other helper ([UPDATE] VMware unlocker link)
- Download the Audio / Sound driver for VMware Mac OS X Lion if you want to get audio working as well (thanks to Manas commentator)
- Download the bootable “Mac OS X Lion bootable vmdk” (find it on Google should be around 4.12GB in size)
- At least 4GB of RAM
- At least 40 GB of Hard Drive space
Make sure you have the above tool ready, after you’ve installed VMware workstation run the Mac OS X VMware unlocker
Pick a location to extract the file.
Go to the location you’ve just extracted the file. should be something like this \Mac OS X Lion VMware Files\VMware Unlocker – Mac OS X Guest
shift + right click on the folder “VMware Workstation Unlocker –Windows” to “Open command window here”
Run “windows.bat” command
When this is done you should see something like the above screenshot.
Now navigate back to the folder \Mac OS X Lion VMware Files\Mac OS X Lion find the named Mac OS X Lion.vmx and double click.
This will open the VMware Workstation, you should see something like the following
Now click Edit virtual machine settings
Here you want to add a new hard disk which will contain the vmdk you’ve just downloaded. Click “Add..” select “Hard Disk” Click next
Select “Use an existing virtual disk”
Browse and find the vmdk file, click “Open”
Click “Finish” when you done.
The reason you want to add another hard drive is that in the original setting, the 40GB has no OS on it, therefore VMware will try to boot off the OS from the second disk (the vmdk file) which will load and boot into Lion Installer.
Now back to the main menu, click “Power on the virtual machine”
From now here just following the on screen instruction to install Mac OS X Lion. Should be pretty straight forward.
When you done installing Mac OS X Lion on the Virtual Machine, go download the VMware tools inside the new Mac OS X Lion
Double click “Install VMware Tools”
After you finish installing the VMware tools, reboot the machine now you should have nativescreen resolutions.
From now on, it’s highly suggested to take a snapshot of the working VM. Incase in the future you done anything that messed up the machine you can always rollback to previous working state with the save of snapshot. From this moment on, you can also remove the second hard drive (the bootable Lion installer vmdk file) that you’ve added to the VM earlier.
Update to 10.7.1
You should be able to install the 10.7.1 update without an issue.
Warning: Please ONLY update to 10.7.1 and take a snapshot of your working systemBEFORE any attempts update to the latest 10.7.2 update release, which will likely cause kernel panic. You can download the update patch to 10.7.1 here
Update to 10.7.2
Here are the steps to enable your VM successfully update to the latest 10.7.2 Lion which includes iCloud and many other integrations. (Thanks to one of our commentator Jay)
1. Download the 10.7.2 combo update from Apple’s website, don’t try to update it from Software Update.
2. Don’t apply the update yet, make sure you have taken the snapshot of your current system
3. Open Terminal inside Lion
4. run the following command, including the dot at the end.
cp -r /System/Library/Extensions/AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext .
5. Now apply the update, but don’t reboot after it’s finished.
6. now go back to terminal and at the same directory location run the following command
7. sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext
8. sudo cp -r AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext /System/Library/Extensions
9. reboot
Update to 10.7.3
1. Make sure you have updated your VM to 10.7.2 before proceed.
2. Download the OS X Lion update 10.7.3 here (don’t download the combo update)
3. Take a snapshot before update
4. Repeat step 3-9 from previous steps in 10.7.2 update and you are good to go.
Note: Things you need to know, in order to keep your VMware Lion Hackintosh up to date, you need to apply update one at a time. Ex, from a fresh install image, you need to first apply 10.7.1 update, then when the update is successful, you need to update your VM to 10.7.2, and finally to 10.7.3. If you try to directly update to 10.7.3 using combo update it doesn’t seems to be working. Good luck !
Optional – Enable VMware Shared Folder
After you’ve had a fully working Lion you can enable the VMware share folder to your Windows 7 host machine. So this way the VM will have access to your Windows 7 file.
To do this, go to the “Virtual Machine Settings” when it was powered off.
Go under options tab, select “Shared Folders”
Pick “Always enable” and click “OK”
Go “Browse..” the folder that you wish to share to.
From here you can pick and choose to make the folder to be “Read-only” or “Enable this share”
That’s all there is. Finish the wizard and power on the VM again you should now see the mount folder on your Lion desktop that points to your Windows 7 shared folder.
Got Stuck ? Checkout The Basic Troubleshoot Guide
Over the last couple month there are large number of readers found this guide to be very useful detailed guide on such topic. However, there are also quite a few number of people experiencing issues with this install guide. Rather than try to answer the questions one by one, I’ve compiled a post dedicated on the topic, how to troubleshoot your hackintosh/VM Mac OS X.
If you are one of those who get stuck, it’s a good idea to check out the guide first BEFORE you try to leave a comment below.
Happy Virtual Machine !
beatsoftech 