Prerequisites…

Patience

VMware Workstation 7/ VMware Player 3
Previous boot-132 experience
Retail Snow Leopard 29.99 DVD (as an ISO or pressed DVD)
A pre-made Snow Leopard VMDK (included)
dariwn_snow.iso (included)
Intel Based Processor with VT-x

Download the VMware image and darwin_snow.iso from here (Rapidshare mirror 1) or here (Mediafire mirror 2) or here (Megaupload mirror 3) (Rapidshare Mirror #4 – thanks iGuru)

More after the jump !

—– Step 1 —–

preparing the image

Open VMware, load the vmx that came with the tbz2

Edit the VMware settings to match your needs (only applicable for Workstation 7)

eg: Extra networking adaptors, shared folders, etc….

Set the darwin_snow.iso as the cdrom media.

Save your settings

—– Step 2 —–

Installing

Start up your OS X VM

Hit F8 very quickly on your Keyboard you will be prompted with the following screen

Right click on the cdrom icon and choose settings

Select your snow leopard DVD/ISO

Make sure that connected is ticked

Click Save

Hit “C” on your keyboard to select “Boot DVD”

Hit F8 and enter -v at the boot prompt then hit enter

Install Snow Leopard as normal

If you get stuck with no destination to select

Click on Utilities -> Disk Utility

Click on the VMware HDD on the left

Click on erase on the right side

choose the format type to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”

set the name to Macintosh HD

Click on “Erase”

then close Disk Utility and you should be able to continue

Complete the install as normal

reboot**

**note:

FakeSMC causes kernel panics on reboot/shutdown in Snow Leopard in VMware for some reason.  Just ignore the Kernel panics and use the VMware reset button.

— From kenokabe —

If you change smc.present = "TRUE" to smc.present = "FALSE" in the vmx the KP goes away

Thanks kenokabe!

—
—- Post Install —-

TAKE A SNAPSHOT before updating or making any other changes to the VM.

Use Apple Software Update to go to the latest version

Reboot

Take a Snapshot

Mount the darwin_snow.iso as the virtual cdrom

Install VMware Tools

Reboot

—- Installing Sound —-

Take a snapshot of the VM

Extract the file EnsoniqAudioPCI.mpkg.tar.gz from the Snowy_Vmware_files.tbz2 archive

Run the pkg and choose both options

Reboot

—- Caveats —-

It seems that for some reason it takes about 10 reboots before Snow Leopard will boot normally into the VM.  you will get stuck at the apple logo for about 3-4 reboots, then you will get to the dekstop but only get the beachball of death.  Keep rebooting and eventually you will get to the registration form, once the registration form loads you will be smooth sailing from now on.

If you receive this message “Mac OS X is not supported with software virtualization. To run Mac OS X you need a host on which VMware Player/Workstation supports hardware virtualization.”

Please go into your Bios and enable hardware virtualization (Please refer to your Motherboard manual for instructions).

— From Coluwyvurne —

I found a sort of fix for those of you that updated to 10.6.2 and find that the keyboard/mouse takes longer to start responding in the guest Snow Leopard.

When Snow Leopard loads into the desktop, press Ctrl+Shift, and either from VM>Removable Devices or the bar along the bottom of the window, disconnect the Universal USB input, and it will disconnect your keyboard and mouse, and reconnect it immediately and become responsive.

—

Beats waiting for 5 minutes for it to start working.

You will always need to use the darwin_snow.iso to boot your VM but this is a small price to pay for having Snow Leopard in a VM right?

—- How to make the boot-132 cd. —-

You will need to have a copy of FakeSMC for Snow Leopard

First take the darwin.iso from VMware Fusion3 from “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages”, modify it to allow booting of OS X client
sed "s/ServerVersion.plist/SystemVersion.plist/g" darwin.iso

Mount the image and copy all the files into a folder on the computer eg: ~/vmware/Desktop/Snow_darwin_iso.

Create an initrd with the following command

hdiutil create -size 5m -type UDIF -fs HFS -layout SPUD -volname initrd initrd.dmg -ov -quiet

Move the dmg to an img

mv initrd.dmg initrd.img

Mount the newly created initrd and the supplied VMware initrd

sudo hdiutil attach initrd.img
sudo hdiutil attach ~/vmware/Desktop/Snow_darwin_iso/.hidendir/initrd.img

copy the contents from the original initrd to the new initrd

sudo cp -Rp "/Volumes/RAM Disk/" /Volumes/initrd/

Now add the extra extensions (fakeSMC) to the initrd

sudo cp -Rp fakesmc.kext "/Volumes/initrd/Library/Application Support/DarwinBoot/Extra/Extensions/"

unmount both of the initrd’s

sudo hdiutil eject "/Volumes/RAM Disk/"
sudo hdiutil eject /Volumes/initrd/

Replace the supplied initrd with the new initrd

sudo cp -Rp initrd.img ~vmware/Desktop/Snow_darwin_iso/.hiddendir/

build the new ISO

sudo hdiutil makehybrid -o darwin_snow.iso ~vmware/Desktop/Snow_darwin_iso/ -iso -hfs -joliet -eltorito-boot ~vmware/Desktop/Snow_darwin_iso/.hiddendir/cdpreboot -no-emul-boot -hfs-volume-name "VMware Tools" -joliet-volume-name "VMware Tools"

you now have a boot-132 cd that will boot a retail SL DVD in VMware

-P|astikman

Thanks to PolishOX for forcing me to do this the right way