In my example, I am running El Capitan, so that is what I will download. To do this, open the App Store and download your version of OS X. Before you get started with the download method, you need to grab a copy of the OS X installer from the App Store. You can install OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, or El Capitan into a virtual machine on your Mac computer. Note that there are two ways to install OS X on VMware fusion: download OS X from the App Store and use that for installing or to use the recovery partition to reinstall OS X. In addition, it doesn’t even work properly for the latest version of OS X. VirtualBox requires using Terminal commands to get OS X installed.

Installation app will remain in your /Applications folder.VMware Fusion is not free, but has more features and is generally more powerful and easier to use than VirtualBox. When the download finishes the Installation app will start automatically, but you can just close it.

If your target macOS version is recent, then it is available in the App Store, where you can download it from, but you need the exact link, since Apple hides older versions from search so that users wouldn’t install them by accident.įinding needed one is pretty easy, just google for “ How to upgrade to macOS ” (replace with needed version), and usually the first results is an Apple Support page ( like this one) which contains a link to the App Store item for newer versions ( macOS High Sierra, macOS Mojave, macOS Catalina) or link to an actual dmg for the older versions ( macOS Sierra, macOS El Capitan, macOS Yosemite).Ĭlick “Get” on the application page in App Store app. This is a simple guide of installing macOS X into VmWare on macOS without a recovery partition or creating external bootable media. However it is surprisingly unintuitive if you don’t have a recovery partition (in which case you can just to Add > New > Install OS X from the recovery partition) or a media, that you can convert into bootable media and use in a new custom VmWare machine. If you own a Mac and a VmWare Fusion, then you can legally create macOS virtual machines. How to create a macOS virtual machine in VmWare Fusion on Mac without a CD, USB drive or recovery partition

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