Create Catalina Macintosh VM on Oracle Virtual Box

By | July 30, 2019

Installation of Mac VM on Oracle Virtual box happened not so easy for me and took more time than with VM for other operating systems. Below I describe my experience of Catalina OS X on Oracle Virtual Box, version 5.0.20. I did not find Catalina ISO file, so I downloaded “macOS Catalina PBeta3 by Geekrar.vmdk” file from it from www.mediafire.com. The attempt to create Catalina VM in the same way as I was doing for Linux VM failed. Now step by step:
Downloaded “macOS Catalina PBeta3 by Geekrar.vmdk” from www.mediafire.com.

1. Create new VM (I used Virtual box 5.0)
2. Select Type “Mac OS X”, Version: “Mac OS X (64 bit)”
3. Set memory size to 8 GB
4. Select “Use an existing virtual hard drive”, “Choose a virtual hard disk file …” – “macOS Catalina PBeta3 by Geekrar.vmdk”
Catalina VM creation
5. Create VM
6. Open Settings
6. In System->Motherboard disable Floppy, check “Enable EFI” box
6. In System->Motherboard disable set CPU at least to 2 (better to 4)
7. In Display set Video Memory to 128 MB
8. In Network change NAT to Bridged Adapter (optional)

Start command prompt as administrator and execute the following command (instead of “Your VM Name” use name of your VM name):


cd “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\”
VBoxManage.exe modifyvm “Your VM Name” –cpuidset 00000001 000106e5 00100800 0098e3fd bfebfbff
VBoxManage setextradata “Your VM Name” “VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemProduct” “iMac11,3”
VBoxManage setextradata “Your VM Name” “VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemVersion” “1.0”
VBoxManage setextradata “Your VM Name” “VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiBoardProduct” “Iloveapple”
VBoxManage setextradata “Your VM Name” “VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey” “ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc”
VBoxManage setextradata “Your VM Name” “VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/GetKeyFromRealSMC” 1

Start your VM. When “Press ESC in 4 seconds to skip startup.nsh or any other key to continue” is displayed, press ESC and type install.nsh :


UEFI Interactive Shell 02.1
EDK II
UEFI v2.40 (EDK II, 0x0001000)
Mapping table
FS0:
  PciRoot (OxO)/Pci (OxlF,0x2)/Sata (0.0,0.0,0.0)/HD(1.GPT.38174806-C6BB-40
05-ADEE-952DA12AB183.0x28.0x64000)
  BLKO: Alias(s):
    PciRoot (OxO)/Pci (OxlF,0x2)/Sata(0x0,0x0,0x0)
  BLK3: Alias(s):
    PciRoot (OxO)/Pci (OxlF,0x2)/Sata(0x1,0x0,0x0)
  BLK2: Alias(s): \
    PciRoot (OxO)/Pci (OxlF,0x2)/Sata(0x1,0x0,0x0)/HD(2.GPT.F146BCCA-69B9-4B
F1-88DC-9EAC01FFA353,0x64028,0xC9BFB0)
Press ESC in 4 seconds to skip startup.nsh or any other key to continue.
Shell) install.nsh

Screenshot:
Start install.sh script

Add appropriate configuration info. Select “Do not transfer”:
Do not transfer

The installation takes may be several hours.
Installtion in progress

If you want to get remote access enable ssh access:
Enable ssh

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