Macosx installation on Windows in Virtualbox

I wanted to try out Vellum , a highly regarded formatting tool for books,used by many bestselling authors on KDP. Since it only runs on a Mac, I was out of options.

I realised I could try to run Macosx in a virtual machine, so i went about finding ways to do it.

The first stumbling block was obtaining the setup image which requires Mac access.So I went to the high seas and found a suitable image.Alas, it was a dmg file.When I tried converting it to iso, it wouldn’t and gave me a cryptic error message saying the dmg was corrupt.

Then I found a different guide which had a mediafire link to an iso image.

The next part was creating a virtual image using the settings required and then pointing to the iso image downloaded earlier.Alas, the box booted but got stuck at a cryptic message and then I got bored.

Something was wrong.

I did some more searches and found this tool.

Installed everything necessary and did it by the book but yet again an error message spoiled my venture into Macos

Virtualbox is not using hardware-supported virtualization features. Check that software such as Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox, WSL2, memory integrity protection, and other Windows features that lock virtualization are turned off. Exiting

I did some more googling and found lots of issues with virtualization. I disabled Hyper-V and anything related to virtualization. Rebooted. Same error.

Then found memory integrity etc and they were all off. Then googled more.

Finally found a thread which was a goldmine for me.

So here’s what I did.

Download the Device Guard and Credential Guard hardware readiness tool

Use a Run-As-Administrator power shell and giving this command DGReadinessTool_v3.5.ps1 -Disable -AutoReboot credits to the thread

When you do this, the laptop reboots and you have to press F3 twice as per instructions to disable device guard and credential guard

But even after this, I got the same message

Then I did this bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

then some more steps given below

1.Disable Windows Sandbox and reboot this wasn’t present since my version is windows Home 2.Disable virtualization in BIOS and reboot 3.Enable virtualization in BIOS and reboot

After all this, finally the setup went ahead.The iso file is hefty at around 9 gb so it might take a while. Thanks to my 75 Mbps connection, I was fine.

Then you have to follow the instructions and even if you get stuck somewhere just redo it.

Tada! Macosx Catalina