text 23 Sep Boot Mac OS X Client in VMWare Fusion from a Physical Disk

Yup you heard right.  Boot an OS X Client installation boot camp style.

  1. Open up Terminal and create a ServerVersion.plist on the hard drive you want to boot from (Replace Macintosh HD with your volume’s name):
    • touch “/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist”
  2. Open Disk Utility and unmount the disk you want to boot from.
  3. While you’re there, get the disk id by right clicking the disk and choosing Information.  It should be disk0 or disk1 or something like that.
  4. Back to Terminal, find out which partition you want to boot from using VMWare’s rawdiskCreator utility (replacing disk0 with your disk id):
    • cd “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion”
    • ./vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk0
  5. Next run this command, replacing your disk id and the “1” with the partition listed in the print command (You can also replace rdm with a name of your choice):
    • ./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 1 ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/rdm ide
  6. For some reason rawdiskCreator mounts the disk you just created a vmdk of, so unmount the disk again.
  7. Now create a new VM in VMWare Fusion using ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/rdm.vmdk as your existing virtual disk.
  8. Select Convert if VMWare says that the virtual disk was created with an older version of VMWare.
  9. Make sure that Mac OS X Server 10.5 (or 10.6) 32-bit is selected.  64-bit may work too, I haven’t tested it.
  10. Save the VM and Boot it.
  11. Enjoy.