Install MAC OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on VMware Workstation 16

Requirements

VMware Workstation 16
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 (10A432) (Retail DVD)
iBoot 3.3.0

Create a Snow Leopard Server VM

VMware workstation doesn’t officially support 10.6, only 10.6 server. To start with, create a new VM:

File -> New
For the installation method, select ‘Create a custom virtual machine’
Operating system: ‘Apple OS X’ -> ‘Mac OS X 10.7’
Memory set 2 GB or 4GB.
Set the number of cores per processor as 2.
Virtual disk can use defaults. New 20GB disk is also fine.
In the ‘Virtual Machine Summary’, click ‘Customize Settings’, go the processors and make sure virtualize intel vt or amd -v/rvi it’s checked. Go down to cd dvd and choose iBoot 3.3.0 as boot image. Go over options down to advanced and on bios as firmware type.
Quit VMware settings.

Modify the VM configuration

Open ‘Snow Leopard.vmx’ in text editor.

Add the following lines to VMX file.

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cpuid.1.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101"
smc.version = "0"
firmware = "bios"

Install Snow Leopard

The virtual machine is ready to start. You can see a screen as shown below, which is waiting for user input. Don’t press any keys.
Now remove (un-mount) iBoot ISO and load Mac OS X ISO file. Follow the steps to do it:
- Right Click on the CD icon on VMware console, click disconnected
- click setting at the icon, choose Mac OS X ISO file.
- click connect at the icon.
- Once you are back to the initial screen, press F5 to refresh CD ROM then ENTER Key.
- You should soon see the Snow Leopard installation icon in the screen, select it and start real installing.
If no disks are listed for the installation, go to Utilities, then disk utility and select the attached virtual hard disk. Create a partition and give a name. Close the disk utility box once all done; newly created partition will appear for installation now. Select it and continue the installation.
Restart the virtual machine after installation complete. If the shutdown/restart doesn’t work in the normal way at end of the installation, we have to do it from VirtualBox console (Machine-> ACPI Shutdown and power off)
Make sure to mount the iBoot boot loader again to CD ROM before it starts. Mac OS X requires proper boot loader to boot from the hard disk on non-apple hardware. In this case, we will boot the virtual machine again by iBoot loader, then install the proper boot loader on the virtual hard disk.

Post installation

Boot from Hard Disk without iBoot boot loader

Make sure you take the snapshot of the virtual machine before continue.

To boot from hard disk, we need to install a package called ‘MultiBeast’. Either download it from VM or transfer from USB disk. After unzipping it, open MultiBeast.pkg.

Screen Size of Snow Leopard Virtual machine

Each boot loaders install separate com.apple.boot.plist file to get special features during boot up. Install this file to get the option to change screen size resolution.

In same Multibeast custom installation, go to Advanced Options and click com.apple.boot.plist.