Running OSX Lion install in VMWare


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A few months ago, my macbook pro (2011) suffered some water damage somehow and the display stopped working, but as far as I can tell everything else works. Everything turns on and it makes it's usually noises, and pressing the volume keys/keyboard brightness keys do what they should, just no display at all. External doesn't work either.

So I gave up on it for a while because I didn't feel like paying $800+ for a logic board, when I wasn't really that impressed with the laptop in the first place. Then for the past few days, I wanted to see if I could somehow get into the system again to enable screen sharing. I had realvncinstalled, but apparently it was a version that was not compatible with Lion, which I had installed just a few weeks before the aforementioned problem. So I can see the macbook on the network, and it tries to connect with realvnc, but realvnc crashes once trying to load the desktop.

I decided to download a vmware image of OSX 10.6 and use it as a makeshift screen so I could theortically guess what was on the other screen when I inputted keyboard commands. I tried installing the updated realvnc this way, and even going into the settings panel and enabling screen/ssh sharing. But alas this didn't seem to work, which makes me think some of the keys perhaps do not work. Which brings me to the point of the question of this thread.

I took the HDD of my macbook pro out, and hooked it up to my windows 7 desktop (which has the osx 10.6 vmware installation). I am aware that windows can't see the mac hdd partition of the harddrive, and most application's I've tried in windows can't do anything with it either. Is there anyway I can boot the raw HDD of my mac osx installation inside a vmware-type application? Even if I have to run the program inside of my other virtualized mac, is there anything I can do?

I just want to change the settings so I can remotely connect to the laptop through vnc.

Thanks for any suggestions.

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vmware fusion 4.0.2

I am trying the above suggestion, but so far I'm getting connection problems even though ping works fine. I believe it has something to do with portscan saying apple's remote desktop port is closed.

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hmmm that version does have lion support so that shouldn't be an issue....

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hmmm that version does have lion support so that shouldn't be an issue....

I'm pretty sure that's still only for the server version though
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grrr why does apple have to make things so freaking hard for people.....

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grrr why does apple have to make things so freaking hard for people.....

I thought that was their motto "Innovating with Complications" :p
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There are plist files but they associate with daemons and I'm not sure you can just enable them. Does anyone you know own a Mac? If so you can take the hard drive out of your machine and boot into it (Target Disk Mode), enable all of the remote information and then just do what I said at the beginning.

Try this - you will need to mount the drive in VMware.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1312397?start=0&tstart=0

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Well, I was finally able to restore access by simply installing realvnc 4.6.3 on the vmware install of osx i had, and then copying those files over to the real hard drive replacing the install of vnc i had on there. I believe the files were in library/vnc or something like that.

Thanks for all the suggestion guys. :)

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Well, I was finally able to restore access by simply installing realvnc 4.6.3 on the vmware install of osx i had, and then copying those files over to the real hard drive replacing the install of vnc i had on there. I believe the files were in library/vnc or something like that.

Thanks for all the suggestion guys. :)

So you did basically the same thing but with vnc. Glad you got it worked. I still recommend ARD as it is smoking fast compared to vnc.

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  • 3 weeks later...

so i have a similar problem. My macbook is no longer with me, but i have a dd image i took a while back. I was able to mount it and get some files off, but i'd like to boot it into a vm. for some reason vm says its not bootable (i used liveview to make the vmdk's). Anyone know how I could boot the dd image of my drive into a vm? I can do it with other OS's, just not OSX.Thx

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