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I'm currently dual-booting OSX and Ubuntu on my Macbook Air, but it'd be nice to run OSX within Ubuntu via VirtualBox. This seems possible using VirtualBox and is legal - there's even a post on an Oracle blog describing this: http://blogs.oracle.com/karim/entry/installing_mac_os_x_in. Actually, I've read elsewhere that it's only legal with OSX Server, but can't find a reason why it'd be illegal with normal OSX - please let me know if you think otherwise.

The problem I have is that a MacBook Air doesn't come with a bootable DVD, but with a "Reinstall Drive" which is a USB stick that comes up as a CDROM drive. It doesn't seem to be ISO9660-formatted though but has an Apple partition table, with OSX installed on an HFS partition. refit says that it has a "boot.efi" as well. I don't know Apple booting/partitioning very well and would really appreciate some advice on how to convert this USB into an ISO or boot it in VirtualBox some other way.

eug
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    "but can't find a reason why it'd be illegal with normal OSX" - because the EULA doesn't allow you to. – ta.speot.is Jun 25 '11 at 07:57
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    While I believe you are asking a question in good faith, note that you are still trying to get around restrictions that are probably there for a purpose. Whether all that is perfectly legal or not, that's not a matter of discussion here. Related: [Mac OS X as guest on VirtualBox with Ubuntu Host?](http://superuser.com/questions/98179/mac-os-x-as-guest-on-virtualbox-with-ubuntu-host) and [How to install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in VMWare?](http://superuser.com/questions/65840/how-to-install-mac-os-x-10-6-snow-leopard-in-vmware) (only to mention a few) – slhck Jun 25 '11 at 08:17
  • The difference between my question and those two is that I am planning to run OSX on an "Apple-branded computer" as required by the EULA, which has no mention of virtualisation. Which part of the EULA do you think this would violate? – eug Jun 25 '11 at 08:51
  • BTW, the EULA is at http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macosx106.pdf – eug Jun 25 '11 at 08:57
  • Well one reason simply being that you are only allowed to have *one* copy of OS X. The virtualization ("running on Apple hardware") probably is not the biggest legal issue here -- consider that by running it in a virtualized hardware environment, you are bypassing OS X system checks that would normally check for Apple hardware underneath. But I'm no lawyer, so I can't give you a definitive answer. – slhck Jun 25 '11 at 09:03
  • Also, you could say that, when Apple specifically allows OS X Server to be virtualized, that it is just not the case for "regular" OS X. – slhck Jun 25 '11 at 09:09
  • I'm not planning to use any cracks so OSX will still be doing those system checks - I think that's what this new VirtualBox feature is all about - it directs the check to the underlying Apple hardware device. I'm also planning to run just one copy - and even delete the natively installed one to free up SSD space. – eug Jun 25 '11 at 09:21

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I got it working by booting from my physical partition. Doesn't exactly answer my original question but it works.

The are two ways of doing it:

  1. Converting the physical partition into a vdi (VBoxManage convertfromraw ...)
  2. Accessing the raw partition directly. I also made it immutable so that VirtualBox puts writes into a separate file - makes me feel safer since raw access is supposed to be quite dangerous (i.e. it's easy to damage the OSX install).
eug
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