So I've found a super-awesome article explaining how to get Mac OS X Lion up and running in VMWare Fusion in Mac OS X (in my case, Snow Leopard).
Here's the link if you're interested in doing this yourself:
Installing Lion in VMWare
I'll say that it runs pretty well on my MacBook Pro, which allocates 3GB of RAM to the virtual machine. Graphics performance is rather suffering, and I assume this is because VMWareTools haven't been updated for Lion yet. The OS itself is pretty quick, performing as it would natively installed.
Advantages to this setup:
- I don't have to dedicate a separate partition to my Lion setup to use (and still try to get used to it).
- I don't have to worry about issues that I might run into later by using Lion (I will explain another scary situation later).
- I don't have to give up my beautifully speedy and functional Snow Leopard installation.
- I can run Lion-specific programs without installing Lion to my hard drive.
- If something screws up, you don't have to erase and reinstall—just use VMWare's handy little 'Snapshot' feature to 'rollback' your OS to previous settings.
Disadvantages:
- I still can't figure out how to install iCloud. It throws a JavaScript error when I try to run the installer. *shrug* I'll figure it out later.
- Graphics performance suffers. No smooth Launchpad or Mission Control animations.
Overall, though, it runs nicely enough. Then again, it
is a virtual machine.
Scary Story:
I recently bought a brand new Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200RPM hard drive for my MacBook Pro (upgrading form the stock 250GB). First thing I did was run a clean install of OS X Lion on the drive, and then transferred everything over. Then I created a Boot Camp partition using the Boot Camp Assistant and installed Windows 7. Upon rebooting into Lion, I got an error concerning my NTFS-3G driver that I had installed and that my Boot Camp driver failed to mount. Quick Google search and I found Tuxera's NTFS drivers for Lion and installed them. Reboot. No error. I was thinking, "yes!" Too early to celebrate. I rebooted into Windows, installed some programs, played some games, hit "Restart Mac OS X" and went to go get a drink. I came back only to find my Mac stuck on the gray Apple logo with the spinning wheel. I figured I could wait it out. Waiting for 20 minutes didn't help. I rebooted the machine and it rebooted into Recovery Mode and launched Disk Utility. I ran the First Aid on my 'Macintosh HD' and got a pretty long list of errors. I clicked 'Repair Disk' and it fixed the issues. I rebooted the machine back into Lion without a single hitch. I figured it was a one-time error that I wouldn't see again.
Boy, was I wrong.
The next day, I rebooted into Windows to play some games (thought you could play decent games in OS X? I didn't think so either). After I was finished driving the heck out of Live For Speed, I restarted in Mac OS X, only to be welcomed by the infinitely spinning gray circle. So, about right here, my reaction was something like this:
Reboot into Recovery, run Disk Utility. Same list of errors. Something about Volume Header Corruption and a few others. At this point, I thought it was ridiculous to have to reboot twice each time after Windows to reboot into OS X.
This led me to believe that something may have been wrong with the new hard drive. Totally possible. So, I went to work and ran TechTool Pro 5 on my computer, and
to my horror, the S.M.A.R.T. test showed errors when testing my drive.
Now what?
Well, I backup everything and erased the drive, starting with a completely spotless installation of Lion. I re-ran TechTool Pro 5 and
found the same S.M.A.R.T. errors as before.
New hard drive time!
So to Newegg's website I ran to request a replacement drive. About a week later, I received my replacement drive, unpacked it, installed it in my MacBook Pro and ran TechTool Pro 5's S.M.A.R.T. test. No errors. Perfect! I ran the Lion Installer to place a clean install on the drive. But
this time, I partitioned the drive not only for Lion and Boot Camp, but for Snow Leopard as well. After Lion was installed, I installed Snow Leopard. Then Windows. Then Tuxera's NTFS driver for Lion. Reboot into Windows. Then reboot back into Lion.
Gray spinning circle of death.
 |
| Painful to watch for 20 minutes... |
I was totally confused at this stage. But I thought I was progressing further into the problem. I re-ran TechTool Pro 5, and whaddya know??
The same errors showed up during the S.M.A.R.T. as before. Couldn't have been another bad hard drive, could it? It wasn't. Upon rebooting into Snow Leopard, I was greeted by the usual Aurora background. And no errors. Restarting in Recovery mode and running Disk Utility (for the 298729th time) revealed the same errors on the Lion partition as before, yet showed no errors on the Snow Leopard partition. Odd. So I trashed Tuxera's drivers and continued to use my machine in it's current state for about another couple of weeks or so, though mostly in Snow Leopard, because Lion was terribly unreliable at the time.
A few days ago, I decided to restart into Lion to update my iCloud stuff (since Apple was too lame to support iCloud in Snow Leopard). Guess what I was greeted by again? Yup. Infinitely spinning gray circle. Another restart, another chime...verbose boot revealed that the machine got stuck booting on....something different every time. Either it was something like "macosxswapon" or something else, but not the "fsck" check that it used to be stuck on. Four chimes later, it still didn't boot. At this point?
I trashed Lion completely. Now I live happily with Snow Leopard, the most reliable OS ever.
So how and why did this painful thing happen? I still haven't figured it out. But I am under the assumption that Lion hates my new hard drive. Snow Leopard and Windows work perfectly
(WINDOWS WORKING PERFECTLY??? *GASP*).
Yes, Apple, when Microsoft's crap OS works more reliably than your new one,
you've screwed up—terribly.
Anyways, I hope this wasn't
too boring of a story. :P
Cheers!
