How to boot into virtual machine of old Macs in VMware Fusion?

[jent]

I'm trying to wipe the data off my old Macs but would like to back them up and be able to run them in a virtual machine if possible, but I'm new to VMware Fusion and virtualization in general.

How should I back up or save my old Macs so that I can take my new Mac and run an instance of the old computers in VMware Fusion?

 

[Boyd01]

Don't know anything about Fusion, but I do this with Parallels and it works great. There are different ways to do it, but what I did was create bootable clones of the old Macs with Carbon Copy. Then, in Parallels, I created a new VM from the clone disk while it was connected.

This created a Virtual Machine with an empty disk that booted from the clone disk (just like a real mac can boot from an external clone). This worked fine, but the external disk needed to be connected. So, I used the appropriate old version of Carbon Copy to copy everything from the external disk to the virtual disk that Parallels had created. Then I could boot directly into the old operating system without connecting the external disk.

No idea if this works with Fusion, but you could give it a try if nobody else has a suggestion.

 

[MacNchedder]

I believe - but am not sure - that after you create the MacOS virtual machine, you could use time machine to back up to the Fusion VM

 

[jent]

Don't know anything about Fusion, but I do this with Parallels and it works great. There are different ways to do it, but what I did was create bootable clones of the old Macs with Carbon Copy. Then, in Parallels, I created a new VM from the clone disk while it was connected.

This created a Virtual Machine with an empty disk that booted from the clone disk (just like a real mac can boot from an external clone). This worked fine, but the external disk needed to be connected. So, I used the appropriate old version of Carbon Copy to copy everything from the external disk to the virtual disk that Parallels had created. Then I could boot directly into the old operating system without connecting the external disk.

No idea if this works with Fusion, but you could give it a try if nobody else has a suggestion.

Thanks for this—I think I follow you. To clarify, you never went through the "Install macOS" prompt that you normally have to do when creating a Mac virtual machine, right? You simply created a blank VM, then booted from the external bootable clone of your old Mac, then (within the "blank" VM running off the external USB clone?) cloned that to the VM itself, which was previously blank, right?

I'm coming across some how-to's online but a lot of them mention downloading the appropriate version of the macOS installer file and using that to create the VM, but I don't think a modern 64-bit version of macOS can even run 32-bit installer (or a PowerPC installer from the pre-Intel CPU days). I also remember there being an issue with the certificates of old macOS installers expiring so I'm just anticipating multiple potential headaches that make me pause as I try to lay out how to do all of this.

 

[Boyd01]

I don't know what a "blank virtual machine" would be. There is no "Install MacOS" option on Parallels, I chose the middle option here to use an image file. That just took a few seconds, then was able to boot my clone. Like I said, don't know anything about Fusion, sorry.