Click Continue, then Continue again to create a bootable disk image file. Drag the Install macOS app into the area that says “Drag the image file here”. To do this, choose File > New in Parallels, and double-click “Install Windows or another OS from a DVD or image file”.

Alternative to the above step: You can use a macOS installer app for Lion or later.Once made, the VM’s name will appear as “macOS 10.x.x”. The easiest way to do this is to choose File > New in Parallels, and then, at the rightmost edge of “Free Systems”, click on “Install macOS 10.x.x from the Recovery Partition”, and follow the prompts. Create a Parallels virtual machine running any version of macOS from Lion onward.If you can locate one, this is about a million times faster and easier, since Parallels supports it.)

(Alternative: a Snow Leopard Server DVD, or disk image thereof. (Hey, it’s not like they’re making it easily available to buy any more.) If you go that route, be careful that you download from somewhere that looks reputable. You just might be able to find it if you Google “snow leopard 10.6.3 download”, but I didn’t tell you that. Maybe you can still get it if you call them. The physical disk used to be available from Apple’s online store as recently as last year, but no more. These steps have been verified to work on version 15.Ī retail (not included with a Mac) Snow Leopard DVD and a drive that can read it, or disk image of same. It probably is a few more steps as a result, but it’s also hopefully easier for more Snow Leopard users to complete. One goal of this method was to prevent the need for typing any commands in Terminal or engage in similar deep technical arcana. Thanks to the many others on the internet who have written things who helped me figure it out, especially that above writeup. There may be less reason to run Snow Leopard today than there was nine years ago, but I was overcome with nostalgia and managed to get it going. Its successor, Lion, was released two years later, so back then I wrote a post about how to run Snow Leopard in a virtual machine so you could, at the time, keep on trucking with AppleWorks, QuarkXPress, Quicken, and other apps that did not have Intel versions available.Īpparently, the method I used stopped working as of Parallels 7, but someone else wrote up how to do it - though judging from the comments, that method stopped working well around Parallels 10 or 11, and I myself could not get it to work. Snow Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.6, was released in June 2009, and it represented the last version of macOS to run older PowerPC based software. If you want our office to set this up for you (which we can do remotely), please email to schedule an appointment.

It has been verified on Parallels 16.1.0. This is a technical post on how to get the Snow Leopard OS running on a Mac in Parallels Desktop, so that older Apple software can be run on a newer Mac.

Mac os parallels