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Does anyone know how to make a .vdi .hdd .vmdk or .vhd image of my Mac? I need to make a perfect clone of my hard drive in one of these formats so I can clone my system in a VirtualBox VM (for development purposes).

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What you are trying to do is not permitted by the OS X license agreement. You cannot run OS X on unsupported (read non-Apple) hardware, including in a virtual environment. – Randolph West Jan 4 '11 at 4:56
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thank you for telling me what i already know. I would still like to know how to make the image. – mtmurdock Jan 4 '11 at 5:01
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@Randolph The legality and reach of licensing provisions differs from country to country. While mtmurdock is in the US, other users might legally be able to use this knowledge. – Daniel Beck Jan 4 '11 at 20:31
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2 Answers

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It's completely legal if the host is also a Mac.

Use a disk cloning software (AFAIK CarbonCopyCloner/Superduper or anything else like that, not my area). It should be able to export to ISO. This command will apparently turn it into a virtualbox hard drive.

VBoxManage convertfromraw /path/to/output/disk-image.iso /path/to/output/disk-image.vdi

Source

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up vote 0 down vote

Check out this thread on StackOverflow.

It's only supported for OS X Server, and on an OS X host.

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This isnt what i was asking. The thread you linked to is about created a new installation of OSX in a VM. I want to know how to make an image of my EXISTING system. – mtmurdock Jan 4 '11 at 21:59
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I'm failing to see the problem. Mac OS X supports restoring from a backup on Time Machine, right? And when you install Mac OS X, it asks you whether it's a clean install or a Time Machine restore. So, I figured you could put the two together and make a plan. – Randolph West Jan 4 '11 at 22:57
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