I bought set of discs on eBay - thanks for the item number tip!
Setup a partion and did the install. Ran the updates, all is well.
Issues:
Can’t use the same BT keyboard and mouse on both partitions (at least not easily). I really really like being wireless and don’t want to keep wired units there unless I absolutely have to. I will be accessing this via screen share for the most part so that is not an issue - but see below:
Startup disk on the SL side does not see the Sierra disk. I need to reboot with the option key.
Also, I think restarting is going to get old so I’m rethinking this.
I found an article about Fusion and SL but it was an older version. Does anyone know if this still works? Or if any other apps like that will let me run SL in virtual mode?
Only OS X Snow Leopard Server, not regular Snow Leopard, has language in its license that permits running it as a guest OS within virtual machine software like VMWare Fusion, Parallels or Virtualbox (and the host hardware still has to be a Mac). As far as I know, all the VM tools try to enforce this licensing to stay in Apple’s good graces but I assume they can’t be 100% successful. I’ve installed Snow Leopard Server as a guestOS in Virtualbox. I haven’t booted it in almost three years because I haven’t had to but also because its performance was terrible, much worse than various Windows operating systems.
At work, rather than try to keep Snow Leopard around to use Rosetta to run a PowerPC application (on an old machine dedicated to that purpose or using Snow Leopard Server in a VM), I made a Windows VM for the one person in the group who really needed the application and installed the Windows version of it. That worked because it was cross-platform software, FileMaker Pro 5; FileMaker licenses are not platform specific and I forget if the installers were readily available from FileMaker but we also had Windows-using groups so we had them anyway.
Curtis Wilcox wrote: “Only OS X Snow Leopard Server, not regular Snow Leopard, has language in its license that permits running it as a guest OS”
True, but traditionally Apple has never cared what individuals do with the systems, and only crack down on commercialization. It’s easy to add one empty file to /System/Library/CoreServices/ to make VMWare checks think that it’s the server version. (I can’t remember the file name off hand.)
It used to still need quite a bit of fiddling to get things to work in Fusion, even with the real server installer, but I haven’t done it lately, so maybe some things are easier now. I hope so, since I need to get my old snowie set up as virtual so I can free up the computer it’s running on.
There are scads of pre-built virtual images out there for download. But they should be left there. 98.29846% come complete with a wide variety of malware.
Diane D wrote: “Can’t use the same BT keyboard and mouse on both partitions (at least not easily).”
You can get keyboards and mice that work via a usb dongle. I think I’ve even seen a usb dongle that does its own bluetooth, but can’t remember where.
“Startup disk on the SL side does not see the Sierra disk. I need to reboot with the option key.”
Disk partitioning has changed quite a bit since snow leopard. I doubt that there’s a sane way to let both systems see both partitions. Virtual is much more satisfying in many ways (drag and drop files and selections, shared clipboard) though it is slower. Running the virtual machine from an SSD over usb 3.0 or faster helps.
Snow Leopard should still be able to read the other partition’s data because it’s running Sierra so it must still be HFS+ (is there even a Mac old enough to run Snow Leopard but new enough to run High Sierra?). It doesn’t surprise me at all that an older OS version wouldn’t recognize a much newer one as “blessed” to boot the Mac. Holding the Option key while booting to choose which OS to run seems like a minor inconvenience, relative to the inconvenience of having to reboot in the first place.
Virtualbox doesn’t have “guest additions” you can install in a guest macOS, VMware does. I guess that’s one of the things you get using a non-free tool.
No, it was news for version 4 that Fusion allowed a non-server version for Leopard and Snow Leopard.
But version 11 only has the servers listed.
Can I also add that this company is the PITS to get in touch with?! They don’t have email, my first call to the US got me 2 people who barely spoke English. Then I was transferred to another number but they neglected to tell me you couldn’t get anywhere without an extension. I tried 3 other US numbers, one was invalid and I left messages at two others. I also filled out an incredibly detailed and lengthy form to try and touch base with them via the website and attempted to post on their FB page.
Was Fusion 4 or so available on disks? Maybe I can buy one that way.
All that said, is there another company where I can accomplish the same thing. I’ve got Quicken and Quickbooks too. I’m not transferring data from 3 programs to Windows.
I run some older programs on Snow Leopard Server in a Parallels Desktop for Mac VM. I also started running Quicken within a Windows XP Pro VM which was upgraded to Windows 7 Pro and then to Windows 10 Pro. Recently I added a High Sierra VM to enable use of capabilities removed in Mojave such as plug-ins for Contacts and Airport Utility management of remote Airport basestations.
Most of these VMs have been in constant use through many revisions of both OS X/macOS and Parallels. The highlight of VM use, especially for Windows, is that the entire virtual machine can be copied or backed up using Finder or as part of a clone backup. Restoring a borked Windows machine is a simple copy of a backup and does not require reinstallation of applications or re-activation.
Curtis Wilcox wrote: “Snow Leopard should still be able to read the other partition’s data because it’s running Sierra so it must still be HFS+”
The file systems are HFS+, but Lion introduced Core Storage, which makes big changes the how the partitioning works. One result of this is true full disk encryption. Snow Leopard and earlier don’t (can’t) understand everything about the disk formatting anymore, so things can get weird.
You may want to try to find a source for “Quicken for Mac 2007 Lion Compatible”. This was the Intel version Intuit released to help people transition from Q4M2007 to Q4M2015. I use it in El Capitan. I have a mid-2011 iMac also, but mine came with Lion installed.
I’m still using it on my mid-2011 iMac in High Sierra, but I doubt you will find that any more. It disappeared from the Intuit site a few years back. I didn’t get any hits from Google just now.
Interesting that you say that. I remember that updater and I know I used it. I had Quicken on one of my laptops to do year end stuff while housesitting. But when I look at the file now it’s definitely the old version. It’s possible I had to reinstall the app when I had a hard drive crash on my G4.
Not sure if you saw my update, but I did get Snow Leopard running on Virtualbox. If I can pull Quicken over to the newer portion, though, I will do it. I didn’t want it on my laptop as I used to use it onsite at one of my jobs.