Making some progress here.
I currently use Fusion for most of my day to day desktop virtualisation, and wanted to get try out the new possibility of creating a virtual machine using Leopard Server so I can play with testing out modifying themes and stuff like that on the wiki and blog servers.
But there are a few little hidden gotchas in doing this. The first one is that when you use a disk image to install (my preferred method since it’s generally faster and I can’t stand carting around a binder full of DVDs) you will run into a problem. When you make a disk image from a DVD the Apple Disk Utility will generally create a .dmg file. Now under most circumstances, you can safely rename this file as a .iso, since the Apple disk image management libraries will take care of mounting the image properly, even though there are a few differences between the two formats.
However, when you try to install Leopard Server in Fusion from a renamed .dmg file, you’ll get an error along the lines of “EBIOS read error 0x31” and perhaps some complaints about bad blocks. Since the file is being read directly and not managed by the Apple libraries, you really do need a native ISO image file to be able to install.
Fortunately, this is a relatively easy task to accomplish. The conversion can be done on the command line using the hdutil tool. The command is:
hdiutil convert LeopardServer.dmg -format UDTO -o LeopardServer
The resulting file will have a .cdr suffix which you can change to .iso. The process makes a copy rather than a direct conversion of the existing file so make sure that you’ve got enough free disk space (~7,1Gb).
It’s also going to take a while depending on the speed of your disks. You should see a series of progress messages to let you know that it’s working - something like the following:
Reading Driver Descriptor Map (DDM : 0)… Reading BOOTCAMP (Apple_ISO : 1)… Reading Apple (Apple_partition_map : 2)… Reading Macintosh (Apple_Driver_ATAPI : 3)… .... Reading Mac_OS_X (Apple_HFS : 4)… ............................................................................... Elapsed Time: 9m 27.325s Speed: 13.2Mbytes/sec Savings: 0.0% created: LeopardServer.cdr
Now you can use this image with Fusion to install Leopard Server.
The other hiccup is that depending on the type of virtual disk you choose, you may get to the installation window with no possible destination. In this case, you need to manually open the Disk Utility from the menu bar, select the disk and format it manually before continuing.
The install is running nicely now…