First Success: Snowy VM VMWare method in Windows 7 64-bit

The very first experience of having a respectable, usable installation of Snow Leopard on Falcor was with a virtual machine, using VMWare Workstation 7, 32-bit edition, on Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

It was pretty straight forward, and all I had to do was round up a copy of the so-called 'Golden Master' (i.e. a .dmg image of the retail Snow Leopard 10.6.0 (or 10.6.1, as of this writing I am clear on 10.6.2 and 10.6.3, but not as to whether there are a .0 as well as a .1 and if so, what the differences between them are). And the files which are provided in this tutorial.

With the help of a few kexts (short for Kernel Extensions) and a version of VMWare Tools meant for Snow Leopard Server, I was able to set up a virtual Snow Leopard machine with networking, sound, graphics including QE (Quartz Extreme, responsible for things like the ripple effects when you put a new widget on your dashboard, as well as other things like Front Row and Cover Flow), CI (Core Image, not so sure what type of graphics that one is responsible for, but you'll often see "QE/CI" bundled together. And OpenGL. In short, I could watch videos, and pass tests like the "are you able to open the Chess app without it crashing" tests, which are common now since System Profiler in SL doesn't say anything about QE/CI.

However, I found disk access to be the deal-breaker. I really wanted to have a nice, zippy Spotlight response time, and it quickly because obvious that it just wasn't gonna happen with a hard drive that was living inside of a bunch of 2GB files on a folder in an actual hard drive. But giving the VM direct access to a physical disk was a little too intimidating, so I decided I just needed to take it up a notch, and just install the OS directly.

NOTA BENE. A little advice from "future you" if you get to this point and find yourself unsatisfied, as I did. Be careful with your Windows partition, and make sure you don't shrink it any more than it wants to be shrunk. Even if you're only using say, 40GB on a 1.5TB hard drive, it could still be saving system restore points at the end of the partition, and it will freak out on you if you go behind it's back and resize the partition with something like Gparted from a Live CD/Live USB. Yes, this is of course what happened to me. I ended up just salvaging my files and having to reinstall Windows. Even then, it took one more botched boot sector before I realized that I needed to be super careful about trying to install SL and Win7 together on the same drive, even if it's a 1500+GB drive.