Yosemite Beta: External HDD the only option?

[Riot Nrrrd]

Has anyone tried to run Yosemite Beta in a VM?

I'm running Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro and wanted to check out Yosemite but I don't really want to dual boot - whenever I reboot the system the dumb Apple RAID card often loses its marbles and thinks the 3rd/spare disk in my RAID5 setup is missing, which is super annoying. So I try not to reboot it unless it's absolutely necessary.

Anyway I tried to install Mountain Lion into a new VM in the latest VirtualBox 4.3.14 release, thinking I could install ML and then upgrade to Mavericks and then install the Yosemite Beta.

I'm not getting very far with that. I get a white screen near the end of the Mountain Lion installer phase and then it eventually black screens on me with a few lines of output and then it just sits there.

I've already got an external 4 GB Time Machine disk so that's taking up my available USB port and power plug.

Is an external bootable drive really the only viable option in this scenario? 🙁

 

[mikecwest]

Has anyone tried to run Yosemite Beta in a VM?

I'm running Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro and wanted to check out Yosemite but I don't really want to dual boot - whenever I reboot the system the dumb Apple RAID card often loses its marbles and thinks the 3rd/spare disk in my RAID5 setup is missing, which is super annoying. So I try not to reboot it unless it's absolutely necessary.

Anyway I tried to install Mountain Lion into a new VM in the latest VirtualBox 4.3.14 release, thinking I could install ML and then upgrade to Mavericks and then install the Yosemite Beta.

I'm not getting very far with that. I get a white screen near the end of the Mountain Lion installer phase and then it eventually black screens on me with a few lines of output and then it just sits there.

I've already got an external 4 GB Time Machine disk so that's taking up my available USB port and power plug.

Is an external bootable drive really the only viable option in this scenario? 🙁

You could try installing Yosemite on an SD card....It might be slow...


My is your primary concern over dual booting? You can always revert back to one partition if needed.

 

[Riot Nrrrd]

[Why] is your primary concern over dual booting? You can always revert back to one partition if needed.

I only have a 256 GB SSD as it is and 30 of that is for a Boot Camp partition.

But again the main reason is as I said, when I reboot the RAID card often thinks that the 3rd disk is missing. It's a big pain in the butt to re-attach it as a spare and wait 12 hours for a rebuild.

What I don't understand is why does VirtualBox have entries for Mountain Lion and Mavericks in its General -> Basic -> Type/Version preferences, if you can't install it?

I can install Mountain Lion in VMware Fusion 5.x but version 6.x requires Lion or newer to run - and I'd need 6.x to run Mavericks and presumably Yosemite Beta or DP5. Sigh.

 

[mikecwest]

I only have a 256 GB SSD as it is and 30 of that is for a Boot Camp partition.

But again the main reason is as I said, when I reboot the RAID card often thinks that the 3rd disk is missing. It's a big pain in the butt to re-attach it as a spare and wait 12 hours for a rebuild.

What I don't understand is why does VirtualBox have entries for Mountain Lion and Mavericks in its General -> Basic -> Type/Version preferences, if you can't install it?

I can install Mountain Lion in VMware Fusion 5.x but version 6.x requires Lion or newer to run - and I'd need 6.x to run Mavericks and presumably Yosemite Beta or DP5. Sigh.

I might be wrong, but I think that the virtual machine programs like that only allow you to run the OS X Server editions, unless you perform a "hack" of some type. I have never done this, but I am sure that Google can be your friend with that topic.

 

[Riot Nrrrd]

Victory!

It was a bit of a struggle, but thanks to a timely tip and a shell script over on the Virtual Box "OS X on OS X" Forums thread, I was able to get the Beta and now DP5 over the Beta to install and run in the current Virtual Box 😎