Instructions: Test macOS with VirtualBox on Windows

Do you also have friends who do free advertising for Apple and constantly tell you how great Apple, everything from Apple and of course macOS is? I also have two of them - they work here... And I wanted to take a look. But that was always rather complicated in the past, or associated with the purchase of expensive small car hardware ;) If you want to get to the bottom of it: macOS runs quite flawlessly and easily as a virtual machine in VirtualBox.

What you need for macOS in VirtualBox

First you need VirtualBox – and if you are looking for an introduction for beginners without prior knowledge, you will find it here. Then you still need macOS – and that works without iTunes or Apple ID. Of course, the variant should also take place without Apple support. In any case, you can find it on the English-language portal Techsviewer not only a guide, but also a ready-made VirtualBox image. And so it actually works smoothly.

You just need the total seven RAR files download and unzip – they will then automatically join the VMDK image together, which you will specify during the installation.

1. Set up the virtual machine

How exactly you set up a VM is up to you here in the tutorial look up. Only the important settings should do it here. First: Just name the new VM macOS, then VirtualBox sets most of the settings correctly. In the assistant you enter the unpacked VMDK image as the hard disk.

You should change: On the one hand, activate the option Use Host/IO Cache in the field of mass storage. On the other hand, it's worth checking the network adapter Network Bridge to set so that you can interact with your LAN. Of course you should too RAM and CPU cores under System turn it up so far that macOS is also fun - the more, the better, the whole thing is not a performance miracle.

2. Customize VirtualBox.

Now bring up the command prompt WIN + R and the command cmd or the start menu and enter the following commands - but with the name of your VM, if not MacOS is called:

VBoxManage.exe modifyvm "macOS" --cpuidset 00000001 000106e5 00100800 0098e3fd bfebfbff
VBoxManage setextradata "macOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemProduct" "iMac11,3"
VBoxManage setextradata "macOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemVersion" "1.0"
VBoxManage setextradata "macOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiBoardProduct" "Iloveapple"
VBoxManage setextradata "macOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey" "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"
VBoxManage setextradata "macOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/GetKeyFromRealSMC" 1

This simply sets a few values ​​to match the image - which also come from the Techsviewer colleagues (I would never have put "Iloveapple" for any kind of date, ever, word on it).

3. Install macOS

The rest is awfully simple standard: start the VM and click through installation routine.

4. Keyboard problems?

Here under Windows 7 there were problems at the beginning: The assistant starts, However, mouse and keyboard cannot be used. If in doubt add in the settings of VirtualBox under USB add a filter for a mouse or keyboard and play around with those settings. Preferably, you should have two mice/keyboards - just in case... Because when the keyboard is bound to the VM, it is no longer available on the host. And then you might not be able to get the mouse out of the VM anymore ;)

After one or two restarts and USB filters, everything settled down here, macOS in VirtualBox under Windows runs perfectly.

You can find more articles about VirtualBox here and more about macOS here. Or how about a few Information about really good operating systems?