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