How can I obtain OS X 10.11 for a Virtual Machine?
MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11
Using Safari only, read the instructions for obtaining El Capitan from How to get old versions of macOS. The respective Virtual Machine host software may or may not create the guest directly from the El Capitan installer .dmg.
Once you run the El Capitan InstallMacOSX.dmg from the download, it should place the full installer, Install OS X El Capitan .dmg in your /Applications folder, which you would then point Parallels at to build the El Capitan guest.
I have El Capitan installed as a guest in the old Parallels Lite v1.3.4 (non-subscription) software on Mojave. Reasonably certain that it used the installer .dmg for the installation. I then managed to mount an El Capitan Time Machine backup to the guest, and then boot into Recovery while in that guest and perform a Restore from Time Machine backup. That was a long while ago, and I cannot recall just how I did that, but it still works. Put the guest out on a USB3 mounted Crucial MX500 SSD.
Thanks for your input. My Mac (2012 Retina 16 GB 512 GB SSD) runs 10.11 El Capitan natively. I need two such bootable partitions so that I can upgrade my native OS to something at or above 10.13 (printer, new software, etc. minimum requirement). To explain, an important licensed app cannot run above 10.11 but my printer died and 10.11 is obsolete among HP products. Now, I am able to download InstallMacOSX.dmg for 10.11 El Capitan, from which How to create a bootable installer for macOS (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372) describes how to create a bootable installer in Applications. I do not see how my particular Virtual Machine desktop (I'm using Parallels 11, which works for Ubuntu LINUX, etc.) is capable of exploiting this OS X 10.11 bootable installer. There are only two options in Parallels 11: 1) Restore From Time Machine Backup (although this doesn't work as Parallels reports there is no Time Machine Backup partition - even though there is one, albeit encrypted (maybe that's a problem?), mounted on the same filesystem as Parallels, and 2) Reinstall OS X, which is what I'd really like to do. Everything in the second option works up to the point (and with a completed download from Apple Store) that Parallels 11 reports that "no packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance." So I assume there must be some problem with the download that Parallels did. That's why I went to the direct download from Apple, which begat InstallMacOSX.dmg. I guess I'm stuck at this juncture. I do not want to "dual boot" my Mac, which is another option but too complicated and possibly risky. That's why I'm going the VM route. Is it possible that VMware Fusion will do what Parallels seems unable to? Or am I missing something obvious that will thread the needle?
The uncertain step here is how Parallels (I'm using 11) installs OS X 10.11 onto the VM, which Parallels creates without problem and initially calls "OS X". I do have the InstallMacOSX.dmg "installer" from Apple which, strangely, only installs the actual installer. The actual installer installs a .pkg file. But how to get Parallels to use this file remains a mystery. Parallels offers only two paths to an OS installation on one of its VMs: 1) Restore from Time Machine (which failed to work - saying No Time Machine Backups, possibly due to the encrypted TM drive), or else 2) Install a fresh copy of 10.11. In the latter, Parallels goes by itself to Apple Store for a copy which downloads (quite a long download, even at 400 Mbps), but then fails to install for some reason with message "cannot install on this machine, contact OS manufacturer" and so forth. Well, I have a licensed OS X 10.11 on a 2012 Retina MacBook Pro I bought new 8 years ago. It works great, but now need both 10.11 and 10.13+ for old software and new printer. So who knows? No one seems to, including my old ISP guru here in Arizona who was able to do it easily he said, but acknowledged he started from OS X 10.13 - maybe starting from OS X 10.11 is a problem. Thanks for your help. Best and bye
OS X on Virtual Machine
