Tag: ISO

Installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (Retail) On Parallels Desktop

Background

Due to agreements with Apple, installation of unsupported OS's is intentionally blocked via the Parallels virtualizer. OS X 10.6 SERVER is supported though. We can trick this check by adding a single .plist file to the installation media.

Tutorial

Download the 10.6 Snow Leopard ISO

https://archive.org/details/mac-os-x-10.6-snow-leopard-retail

Once it's downloaded, mount the ISO with a double click. You should see the mounted volume appear.

Open a Terminal.

nano /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist

Paste in the following (from OS X Server 10.6)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
        <string>10A433</string>
        <key>ProductCopyright</key>
        <string>1983-2009 Apple Inc.</string>
        <key>ProductName</key>
        <string>Mac OS X Server</string>
        <key>ProductUserVisibleVersion</key>
        <string>10.6</string>
        <key>ProductVersion</key>
        <string>10.6</string>
</dict>
</plist>

This will create the required ServerVersion.plist; writing it will be on the installation media. There is no need to make a new image to apply these changes. Just Ctrl+X, Y, Enter to write the file.

Note: The installer/setup will say "Mac OS X Server" but you are actually running the retail OS X Snow Leopard installer. It's just the text.

Next, install from that ISO. Parallels Desktop -> New Virtual Machine -> "Install Windows, Linux, or macOS from an image file" -> Choose Manually -> "Mac_OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard_Retail.iso" -> Boot and Install

After the installation finishes you have one more thing to do. You need to copy the the ServerVersion.plist over to the boot drive.

Shutdown the VM -> Change the Boot Order to CD/DVD -> Boot Back into the Installer -> Utilities -> Terminal

cp /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/CoreServices/

Shutdown, Swap the boot order back to HDD first

Once it's finished installing, you're good to go. Boot it up as you would with any other VM and install the Parallels Tools. About This Mac will report that its Server 10.6 but you still get the Stock Retail experience.

Tools for 10.6 from Parallels Desktop 18.0 - https://github.com/downthecrop/misc/blob/main/prl-tools-mac.iso.zip

Note: Written January 29th, 2026, Parallels Desktop 20.4.0, Mac mini i7 Late 2014

DriveDroid – Install and Boot Windows, Linux, or BSD using Android Device as USB Drive

DriveDroid is an extremely useful Android utility application that allows rooted Android Phones to act as USB Mass Storage or a virtual CD-ROM drive. This can come in handy for booting PCs or emulating a USB drive of your own chosen size. The app only works on phones with root. I've personally tested DriveDroid on my rooted LG Nexsus 5X using Android 8.1 Oreo and Android 9.0 Pie and can confirm it is functional for installing BSD, Linux, and Windows.

Most phones emulate a USB stick when using DriveDroid. This is baked into the kernel of your phone. This means that only images that are compatible with USB sticks can be used. All IMG files will work, but not all ISO files will.

DriveDroid http://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid

Installing/Booting Linux ISO from Android

Booting into live Linux environments or installers is clearly the main use for DriveDroid and it works exactly as you'd expect. You can use the included ISO download tool included in the application to get a verity of popular distributions. I was happy to see Void Linux made the list of easily downloadable ISO's as it's a personal favorite distribution of mine. The distributions I tried include: Ubuntu 19.04, Manjaro XFCE 18.1, and Debian 10 "Buster" Net Install. All Booted both UEFI and BIOS without issue simply selecting the ISO file in the app. I would suggest downloading your ISO's from your fastest mirror using your phones browser. This allows for faster speeds and the ability to resume the download if it's interrupted.

Installing Windows using Android as Installation Media/USB Drive

To install Windows from DriveDroid you need to create the installation media the same way you with a traditional USB drive. You can emulate a standard mass storage USB drive of any size using an image file with DriveDroid but you need to first create an image to be used. I wasn't able to use the blank image creation tool inside of the app but there is a simple work around.
Open any terminal emulator on your Android device and issue the dd command with a target of /dev/zero. 

dd if=/dev/zero of=MyDrive.img bs=1m count=5120

Note: The of location is where the output file will be created. This example command will create a blank 5GB image in your working directory.

This will create a new empty image file that can be written to like any standard flash drive or thumb stick. If you don't have access to a PC to burn the ISO using the Windows Media Creation Tool or WoeUSB on Linux you can download my pre-created image for Windows 10 Build 1903 (May 2019 Update) here or from the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/windowsx641903may2019img