Table of Contents. Install macOS Catalina on VMware on Windows PC New Method VMware Workstation. Step One – Create or Download macOS Catalina ISO For VMware & VirtualBox. Step Two – Install VMware Workstation Player or Pro. Step Three – Install macOS Unlocker for VMware. Step Four – Create A New Virtual Machine. It succeeded Mac OS High Sierra 10.13 which was released on the 25th of September in 2017 and was preceded by the macOS Catalina 10.15 which was released on the 7th of October in 2019. This macOS is known to be the last one developed by Apple to support 32-bit applications as macOS Catalina only supports 64-bit applications. This exercise was to get a running MacOS Catalina VM instance running on VMware. I first wrote this for Catalina Beta but afte rthe official release, a couple things changed. So now it is how to install Catalina on ESXi 6.7. I am using a 2013 Mac Pro with VMWare 6.7 U2 installed. I have High Sierra and Mojave VMs running on the host.

I have bought a new laptop to replace the old one – Sony VAIO E VPCEG23 11 years old, It’s ASUS Zenbook UM425IA from newegg.com, but wait, the AMD laptop. Yeah, it’s AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics Vega 7.
This is my new laptop specìication:

• ASUS Zenbook UM425IA-NH74
• AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.1 GHz)
• 1 TB PCIe NVMe Intel SSD
• 16 GB LPDDR4X RAM Dual chanel
• Windows 10 Professional included
• HDMI, USB Type C, Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.0
• USB 3.2 Type A, USB 3.2 Type C and Micro SD card reader
• USB-A to RJ45 ethernet adapter and USB-C to Audio Jack dongle

And this guide is a Personal experiment about how to setup the Fresh MacOS on the Laptop AMD with Windows 10 host.

VMware’s graphics acceleration not being compatible with macOS, you will not have any graphics acceleration in your virtual machine.

Prerequisites

• CPU also needs to support the SSE4.1 and AMD-V
• VMware Player /Workstation Pro 15 or higher
• VMware Unlocker: https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker

Configure the VMWare

• Install the VMWare as your way, either Player or Workstation will be fine.
• Run the Unlocker by running the win-install.cmd with Administrator right.
• Open VMWare, create a new VM, Select Apple Mac OS X under Guest operating system and choose 'macOS 10.15' under Version. Leave all the option to the default. We will update the Hard Disk later.
• Click on Finish once finished.
• Update the Hard Disk by Click on Edit virtual machine settings.

• Add a new Hard Disk by click on Add.. -> Hard Disk

• Select SATA -> Use an existing virtual disk

• Click on Ok when Finished.

Installation MacOS

Start the virtual machine.

The language prompt will come up. Select your language and continue.

Select 'Disk Utility' and press 'Continue'.

Select 'VMware Virtual SATA Hard Drive Media' under 'Internal' hard drive.

Select 'Erase' in Disk Utility. Name the drive 'Catalina'. Change 'Format' to APFS and press 'Erase'. Press 'Done' and close Disk Utility.

Select 'Reinstall macOS' and press 'Continue'.

When the installer opens, press 'Continue'.

Agree to the terms and conditions. Select the hard drive that we erased earlier with Disk Utility and press 'Install'. Sit back and let it install.

The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system. Power off or reset the virtual machine.

Edit the vmx file by adding the following line to the bottom of the vmx file:

Back to the BIOS, Select 'EFI VMware Virtual SATA Hard Drive (2.0)' and press enter. This is our Catalina installer that we are booting.

Once the installer has booted, click on 'Utilities' in the Finder bar and select 'Terminal'.

Type this command in Terminal (replacing 'Catalina' with whatever you named your hard drive earlier):

With that command, we coppy all the prelinkedkenel under the installation source CatalinaAMD
/Volumes/CatalinaAMD/System/Library/PrelinkedKernels/prelinkedkernel to the Hark Disk Catalina /Volumes/Catalina/macOS Install Data/Locked Files/Boot Files/

After execute the command, restart the VM again. The Catalina installation process will be continued:

If the VM restarts and you get a ‘CPU is disabled’ error, close the error window, attempt to close the VM window, select ‘Power Off’ and reopen VMware.

Reboot the VM back into the BIOS, select the installer and open Terminal once again. Time to do the post-install commands. (replacing 'Catalina' with whatever you named your hard drive earlier):

You may get errors, Ignore those errors, the prelinkedkernel should still rebuild just fine.

Osx Catalina Vmware

Close Terminal and reboot into your hard drive. The VM should boot into the setup now. Go through the setup process but DO NOT SIGN IN WITH YOUR APPLE ID, choose 'Set Up Later'.

The setup almost be done. Do your best 😀

=> Upgrade to the Big Sur

Nam Le,
Personal experiment with https://amd-vm.hackintosh-guides.ml/

Last modified on August 6th, 2021 at 3:37 pm

Nam Le
lequocnam

THOUGHTS:

It works… after too many hours, I had success with a 4-processor, 8GB (memory), 100GB (storage) virtual machine running under either Oracle VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation 15.5.1

It’s slow, VERY slow, despite running on the latest i7-8* processors with a GTX 1060 to do graphics acceleration, it’s painfully slow compared to ANY other virtual machine running. MacOS 9, Fedora, Ubuntu ran circles around Catalina with lesser specs.

It’s not worth the effort. I’m glad I did it so that I understand what’s possible with Mac OS X as a virtual machine, but it’s way too underperforming compared to any other OS as a virtual machine.

Vmware Osx Catalina Download

These are all my notes for anyone else who wants to try:

1) REFERENCES:

1) HOW-TO:

1a) Install MacOS X 10.15.2 Catalina on Windows PC:
https://www.geekrar.com/install-macos-catalina-on-virtualbox-on-windows-pc/
1b) Install MacOS X 10.15.2 Catalina on VMware:
https://techsprobe.com/install-macos-catalina-vmware-windows/
1c) Install MacOS X Unlockr 3.0.2 for VMware 10-15 on Windows 7-10:
https://www.sysprobs.com/vmware-workstation-8-0-8-0-1-unlocker-to-run-mac-os-x-guest-in-windows-7
1d) Convert Virtualbox VMs to VMware:
https://www.howtogeek.com/125640/how-to-convert-virtual-machines-between-virtualbox-and-vmware/

2) LINKS:

2a) Download MacOS X 10.15.2 Catalina ISO for VMware and Virtualbox: https://www.geekrar.com/download-macos-catalina-iso-for-vmware-virtualbox/
2b) Download latest MacOS X Catalina images:
https://www.geekrar.com/download-macos-catalina-vmware-virtualbox-image-latest-version/
2c) Download latest VMware Unlockr (maintained by Paolo after Donk stopped):
https://github.com/paolo-projects/unlocker

3) WINDOWS VIRTUALBOX – EXTRADATA

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