I won’t fully apolgize for saying I wanted to punch Apple. Mainly, this is made much harder than it needs to be. If this doesn’t make sense read my previous rant about getting the install image for OSX Mountain Lion to run a VM legally and licensed on my Mac Mini purchased with Mountain Lion pre-installed.
In that article I cite an article that ended up having the answer if I would just follow the intructions. Go there I will re-describe here with the steps to getting the image installed in Fusion.
Get the BaseSystem.dmg
First we are going to mount the Apple_Boot Recoery HD. The attach the baseSystem.dmg image as a drive.
From the list we now enter:
>diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk0s3
and
>hdutil attach "/Volumes/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSystem.dmg"
The result of the hdutil attach command opens this window in finder. This is where I got it all wrong. Instead of following the directions I thought. Well instead of copying everyting in the download and force quiting like the instructions. I will just get the VM to boot from the BaseSystem.dmg. This seemed to be working fine.
On a side note. The BaseSystem.dmg is invisible in finder. From the CLI you can see it and make a copy from the Recovery HD to your main partition. If you want to be able to actually view the file use the command for the CLI:
>chflags nohidden ./BaseSystem.dmg
All this will do is get you this error during the install process with the menacing eyes of the Mountain Lion and the barely QA’d error message saying you didn’t buy Lion. No duh I didn’t buy Lion my mac CAME WITH Mountain Lion. Oh well I digress.
Back to instructions that will actually help you.
Install OSX Mountain Lion
Show All Disks
Use your handy EMC Elect 64GB USB drive
Seriously my 8GB USB was too small the next size up I own is 64GB (thanks @mjbrender)
Now we wait – then Force QUIT
So with a large enough USB drive you click install. The installer will now download 4+GB of installtion files into a InstallESD.dmg image on that USB drive. Now you have to read carefully. You must Force Quit when the installer is finished downloading and ready to reboot. Don’t Reboot. ALT + right click (or two finger’d, whatever). If you just normally quit the app in the dock it will clean itself up and delete the InstallESD.dmg file. Some reported seeing the file in the “Trash” after a normal quit, that just not how I roll. Force that junk!
Now copy that file somewhere else for fusion install.
The USB drive in Finder
In Fusion create a new VM
I am using Fusion 5 so this probably won’t work in previous versions with OSX 10.8
Click Continue without disc.
Choose a disc or disc image…
Now select the InstallESD.dmg image. Now Fusion will detect that you are installing Mac OSX 10.8 and roll on. Amazingly enough now it does not ask for your AppleID to verify the installation was purchased from the App Store.
Install the VMware tools and now you have a happy little OSX VM.
Turning rant back on:
I started messing with this morning and now it is 3:45pm. Thanks for taking a Saturday Apple. Urgh.