more complicated than I thought, VMware Workstation patch and difficult to create ISO image.

1. macOS High Sierra 10.13 Beta 3

If you don’t have mac, you need to spend some time to find the source. check out  https://betas.cmacapps.com/ to find a suitable one.

Unzip the dmg file by 7zip, InstallESD.img & BaseSystem.dmg located in “macOS High Sierra Beta\Install macOS High Sierra Beta.app\Contents\SharedSupport”

In PowerShell, compare their SHA-1 checksum to https://github.com/notpeter/apple-installer-checksums

2. convert DMG to ISO

unfortunately dmg2iso does not work, boot up failure. I only find people repack it on Mac OS. At the same time, I don’t like using third party vmdk image. So the work around is using 3rd party image to repack dmg to iso for vmware installation.

2.1 High Sierra vmdk image

follow the instructions and download vmdk from Google drive only. https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-high-sierra-vmware-windows/

next, download the tools to unlock vmware from https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker. It provides python script to patch, yet unfortunately it does not work well in python3, after converted by 2to3.py, still have modules missing, print sytax and str on buffer API …etc

so just open command prompt with Admin right, then run win-install.cmd & win-update-tools.cmd , it will patch VMWare workstation for appleSMCTable about smc.version = 0 and smc.version = 1

After vmdk file downloaded, follow the installation instruction from the link above.

2.2 Bootable ISO image

After installation completed, upload InstallESD.img & BaseSystem.dmg to macOS vm. I had upload the whole SharedSupport folder.

Run the following script to create ISO file

3. Configure another new VM

Just ordinary VM creation. After finish config, don’t start vm yet. edit the vmx file,
add smc.version = "0"  to the file. Then now start the VM.

select the ISO file created in step 2.2 as CD/DVD in virtual machine setting.

Once boot up, open Disk Utility, Erase the hard disk, format as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)“. Although High Sierra has new APFS, I am unsure how well it goes with vmware at this stage.

Finally, quit Disk Utility, and select “Reinstall macOS”, and follow the installation prompt.

After installation completed, dismount the CD-rom, and mount the darwin.iso which get from win-update-tools.cmd, to install VM-tools.

4. reference