Darwin on VMware

This page is outdated and should not be updated further. The content below is preserved purely for historical reasons. As such, any instructions or suggestions on this page may damage your system. Follow them at your own risk.

Installing Darwin in VMware the easy way

This manual describes the installation of Darwin

• from a Darwin 8.0.1 CD image
• using a virtual HD image
• in VMware 5.0

Please note: You need a CPU that supports SSE2 or SSE3 instructions, like a new Pentium 4 or an Athlon64 does, to install Darwin.

If you don't, it will hang in the "The following devices are avalaible for installation" section!

Please also note: You need to create a virtual IDE hard drive, Darwin will not find a SCSI drive!

Let's begin

1. Start virtual machine in VMware

2. Press Esc and select CD/DVD

3. Let Darwin boot from CD/DVD image

4. Enter 1 to install it on first HD

5. Enter 2 to partition the HD manually

6. Enter y to initialize the partition table

7. Enter the following:

auto hfs (to automatically create partitions using the HFS+ filesystem)
update (otherwise it won't boot after installation)
write
quit

8. Answer the questions on the screen as you would normally do (use HFS+ as filesystem)

9. Then it will say "error: nknown filesystem type:"

10. Just press enter to reboot

11. When it has booted again, enter 1 to choose first HD

12. Then press 3 to use the existing partitions

13. Continue the installation normally...

14. After the installation has finished, start the virtual machine again

15. Press F2 to set first boot device to HD in BIOS

16. There you go...

Tip

When you get the messages "SAM Multimedia: READ or WRITE failed, ASC = 0x24, ASCQ = 0x00" then just hit enter to see the login prompt

Also darwin will normally boot into read-only mode. Before boot add the following command -s to boot into single user mode.