UPDATE: Adobe recently released BrowserLab … If you want a fast method of previewing your sites on different versions of IE running on different OSes, you might want to check it out 
After recently weening myself off Windows and on to Mac OS X – and deleting my Windows partition – it became pretty clear that if I would need some method of running Internet Explorer on my Mac if I wanted to continue doing web development with any kind of success. After a bit of Googling, a bit of testing, and healthy dose of “issues”, I have come up with a fast, stable – and best of all free – method of running IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneously on my Intel Mac legally.
First of all, you will need to download a bunch of software. I have listed all of this below:
- Download Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.6 The exact version 2.0.6 of VirtualBox must be used for this process, at least until the network drivers are installed. At the time of writing, the latest version 2.1.4 will not allow the network drivers to be installed correctly.
- Download Q
- Download The Unarchiver
- Download the Microsoft IE6, IE7 & IE8 Disk Images
Next, I put together a list of steps that need to be followed in order to get this all working. Read though it first, as I have attached the reasons why I have done things a certain way to help you get a feel for what is going on.
- Install VirtualBox. This is the virtual machine that will be used to run the various OS and browser images.
- Install The Unarchiver. This will be used to extract the virtual machines from the *.EXE files.
- Install Q. This will be used in the process of converting the Microsoft *.VHD virtual machines into native VirtualBox *.VDI virtual machines.
- Run The Unarchiver, and associate it with *.EXE files.
- Open the IE6, IE7 & IE8 images using The Unarchiver. A new folder will be created, with a *.VHD in each of these.
- Open Terminal, and type the listed commands for each of the *.VHD files. This will allow all of the images to be mounted and executed together without any conflicts. Currently all the Microsoft images share that same hard disk identifier, and this method allows it to be changed.
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc OldVHDImage.vhd NewRAWImage.raw VBoxManage convertdd NewRAWImage.raw NewVDIImage.vdi
- Run VirtualBox, and follow the listed steps for each of the *.VDI images.
- Go to the File menu, and select Virtual Disk Manager…
- Click on the Add toolbar button on the Virtual Disk Manager window, and select the appropriate *.VDI from the file selection dialog.
- You should now see the *.VDI image in the list. Click on the OK button.
- Click on the New toolbar button on the Sun xVM VirtualBox window, and follow the prompts on the Create New Virtual Machine window. Ensure that the right OS type is selected, and that adequate RAM is allotted for the virtual machine.
- Select the new virtual machine, and click on the Start toolbar button on the Sun xVM VirtualBox window. Immediately after this, tap F8 to enter the Windows Advanced Options menu.
- Select Safe Mode from the menu, and press the Return key.
- Once Windows has booted up in safe mode, cancel all of the hardware prompts.
- Go to Start, then select Run… . Type cmd into the input field.
- At the command prompt, type each of the listed commands. This will prevent the virtual machines from bluescreening, and will allow the appropriate network drivers to be installed.
cd \WINDOWS\system32\drivers ren processr.sys processr.old exit
- Restart the virtual machine. Windows will likely prompt you to do this after is has detected the change.
- Once Windows has booted up, cancel all of the hardware prompts.
- Go to the Devices menu in VirtualBox, and select Install Guest Additions…
- Follow the prompts within Windows to install the guest additions, or drivers. You will be prompted to reboot your virtual machine at the end of this process.
- Once Windows has booted up, you will be presented with the Hardware Update Wizard. Select Install the software automatically, and click on the Next button.
- Follow the prompts and wait until the network adapter is installed.
If all goes well, you should have three virtual machines that can all run together synchronously for some serious browser testing. If you would like a little more information, I would suggest checking out Jeff Couturier’s article (he has a nice tutorial video on the site too), and Jeremy Gillick’s article.
UPDATE: It appears this article has been translated into Danish by Rasmus Luckow-Nielsen. Thanks Rasmus!
Tags: apple, compatibility, compliance, ie6, ie7, ie8, internet explorer, mac os x, microsoft, sun, testing, vdi, vhd, virtualbox, w3c, web standards
[...] Affirmix.com, 10voltmedia.com Tags: ie6, ie7, IE8, image, internet explorer, microsoft, virtual, virtualbox, [...]
Great article…but i need help…i’m pretty much stuck around #6 (dealing w/ terminal). I’m not that strong with terminal so i was hoping that you could provide a bit more detail with this area
No problems Shaun
Here are the steps to complete step 6:
Hope that helps
Don’t be scared about doing anything wrong either. If you mess up one of these commands, the worst thing that will happen is you get an error – it very unlikely you will destroy anything. My advice would be to just give it a try, and let us know how it goes 
Thanks! This was very helpful.
A few notes….
I was unable to get IE6-XPSP3.exe to Unarchive. It just hung. Had to kill -9 PID. IE7-XPSP3.exe went smoothly and quickly so there may be something wrong with the IE6 Image. Tried downloading the image several times. I have the latest Unarchiver version 1.6.1.
It’s unfortunate that MS VPC Images expire in August 2009. Hopefully there will be another round.
Hey Rich, you may want try a different archiving program then… Unarchiver is my personal preference, simply because it a polished and fast little program, but many people tend to recommend Zipeg – maybe you have more luck with that one.
Microsoft have been pretty consistent with the release of new images, I don’t think there is too much to worry about. I think you just got the new round as well, it seems like Microsoft only just released their new batch of images today.
Thanks! Great tutorial, the step-by-step instructions made setup a cinch.
Anyone know any hacks or workarounds for when these images expire in August though? While this works great it will be a pain to get everything set up, working, and then have to do it all again whenever Microsoft releases new images.
Any suggestions?
Thanks so much for this. Saved me a lot of headaches!
The IE6 image hung for me as well, and so did the IE8 image. IE7 worked as advertised. Tried again with Zipeg and both IE6 and 8 extracted fine.
I’ve been looking for this forever. I’m trying it right now. Hope it works!
In their EULA for these VPC images, Microsoft states that: “You may install and use one copy of the software on your device of which you are running a validly licensed copy of Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual Server. You may not change or convert the virtual hard disk image from the VHD format. “.
So I’m not entirely sure that this method is 100% legal.
[...] Andrew Odri » Blog Archive » IE6, IE7 And IE8 On Mac OS X Step By Step [...]
It worked! It took me a couple of hours to get everything working, but it’s a great, free and lightweight solution! Thanks for the tutorial Andrew!
The 2 things that stumped me where, first, the conversion to .raw. The 1.5gb .vhd became a 15gb .raw for some reason. I thought it was an error and tried it many times, but always got the same ballooning just at the end of running Q. In the end, I tried it and it worked.
The second thing was accessing my local test webapp at IE, since localhost doesn’t work. The solution is to run cmd.exe in Windows, and then ipconfig. That will give you your IP, which is apparently what works for most people, but for me and my strange setup it was the gateway number which worked.
Thanks again!
thanks for the writeup. very helpful. i have some comments for everyone:
unrar will also decompress the .exe files.
the raw files produces at step 6 are 16 GB so make space for them.
with vbox 3.0 i no longer get a BSOD on first start of the vm. so after starting the vm in step 7.4 i skipped the F8 bit and steps 7.5-9 resuming at 7.10.
the vbox guest extensions installer did not always auto-run for me on step 7.11 but it can be found on D: and run manually.
in order to get the network adapter driver working i needed to manually extract the drivers from the vbox guest extensions with D:\VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe /extract /D=C:\Drivers and then point the driver install wizard at C:\Drivers\x86\Network\AMD
I get the insert windows installation cd prompt when I try and install the network driver. Any ideas?
Hi there,
I have IE8 in one virtual machine, works fine.
But I still haven’t been able to install a 2nd one. IE7 in this case.
- Converting from .vhd to .raw created a 16 GB file within a second! unlike the 15 min I expected. Also I did not get any text on screen, just the blinking prompt returned almost immediately.
- Converting that .raw to .vdi gave me a file of 279.1MB (is that normal?)
- Using that .vdi with Virtualbox after starting the new virtual machine gave me ‘a disk read error’ leaving me only the option of shutting the machine down. I could not get to the screen where I would select safe boot.
Any ideas?
Ok, my bad.
You really need to wait for the convertion to .raw (and later .vdi) to be done. Just a blinking prompt is not enough
I managed to get right to installing the XP in Virtual Box, but then it tells me I can’t log in because I need Windows Advantage to register Windows.
[...] a Mac but recently I discovered a better way of setting up a testing environment for IE thanks to Andrew Odri and Jeff Couturier and their great articles. (All credit goes to them in steering me in the right [...]
After completing all these steps, I get a unique error:
VM cannot start because the hard disk ‘/Users/jackson/Library/VirtualBox/Machines/XP SP3 with IE7 2009-Apr.vdi’ is not accessible (Actual UUID {9a52ef9f-30a3-4261-a679-3cc1af4bd197} of the hard disk image ‘/Users/jackson/Library/VirtualBox/Machines/XP SP3 with IE7 2009-Apr.vdi’ doesn’t match UUID {898f73ec-526c-4f36-a906-c20c9f85b6fe} stored in the registry).
Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×80004005)
Component:
Console
Interface:
IConsole {e3c6d4a1-a935-47ca-b16d-f9e9c496e53e}
It seems that your steps modified the UUID of the hard disk image, but the registry was expecting a different UUID.
Does anyone have any thoughts??
Having the same XP activation issue as Phil Haggar. Anyone find a solution?
From what I understand a few things have changed with the setup procedure, and the Microsoft images will be expiring very soon as ell.. I’ve been very busy, but I will try to revisit a few of these points over the week, and answer a bunch of questions
I’m also struggling to get this going. Seems that the new versions need to be activated (I’ve only tried the IE8 image – will try the other one now too). I guess we need to ask someone at microsoft in order to get this going.
Couldn’t find any way of contacting MS, typical. I had exactly the same problem with the IE7 install but by not restarting the machine I managed to get the network drivers working and have saved a snapshot so that I can use this for testing. It’s enough to get by but not exactly ideal.
Would be interested to see what you can come up with Andrew.
I definitely “get” all the concepts here — and executed all the steps. I can get either one working alone — but not both of them at the same time. (See my post about the UUID issue)
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Grabbing the latest images now (someone at Microsoft told me they were working on creating the new images last week). I sent them an email last week, and THREE different people responded to me, re-assuring me that new images would be up in a timely manner so we aren’t stuck without testing images. That was surprisingly cool.
Thanks, Andrew, for posting this original article. It’s a good resource. We just need to get to the bottom of the UUID issue. I don’t understand how you’re not having the exact same problems when you try to add both of those to VirtualBox (even after converting them from vhd to raw, then raw to vdi)
OK… please forgive me for making a mistake. I followed the directions on this post, and thought I encountered a problem. Boy was I stupid. I accidentally mixed up the VDI and VHD when I was adding my second image (for IE7, since I already had IE6 working).
Anyway… I accidentally added IE7-XP.vhd instead of the .vdi, and of course, I had a UUID conflict. Makes sense, considering one of the biggest reasons we converted the image in the first place was to allow us to have multiple images running simultaneously (in the native VirtualBox format too).
It’s all working wonderfully now!!!! Thank you SO much for this wonderful post/article. It’s so nice to have a fully working VM for IE6 and IE7 testing. The fact that this is opensource, and Microsoft provides images for free makes it sooo sweet. I really, really like the desktop integration that Parallels offers, but I can’t justify the cost of their app plus a Windows license, as well as the hours upon hours of setup time it would require to get two copies of windows xp running, one with Ie6, and one with IE7. Plus I’ve read that downgrading from IE7 to IE6 can cause major problems with filters and other things that make it ever harder to test PNG fixes, and all those cool javascript IE-upgrade libraries out there.
I suppose if I needed to do anything other than test IE in Windows, I would probably invest in Parallels, because the desktop integration is so impressive. I love being able to choose which app to open files in, I love the start menu integration (it makes seemless/coherence mode so much better), and the shortcuts between OS’s, and folder and file system integration, etc). Parallels is a nice product (I’m a VMware veteran, but on OS X, I really prefer Parallels).
Thanks again!!!!
I had this running once apon a time, but now i get the activation problem previously reported.
Is it just me, or does that mean you can’t test ie6 on a mac, renderinging my macbook a little useless for web development?
disaster, and my paranoid anti M$ mind is starting to wonder if this new obstacle is an accident.
Hey, thanks again for the feedback everyone! I now have a few issues to look into
I’m really keen to revisit this section and get some solutions for everyone. I should have some free time coming up in a few weeks 
FYI, I get this message when trying to extract the .exe with The Unarchiver.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/augustl-stuff/the-unarchiver-extracting-IE7-65.png
Just for the record, the error that August is referring to says “The contents of the file ‘IE7-XPSP3.exe can not be extracted with this program.’”
I’m getting the same error message. It’s a message from The Unarchiver.
August, do you have Darwine installed? I do and I’m wondering if that’s the problem…
Good news! Found zipeg which lets you open and extract the files!
Zipeg at: http://www.zipeg.com.
One thing I forgot! You need to change the file extension from .exe to .zip in order for zipeg to recognise the files
Thank you for this great tutorial. I ran into activation issues with the latest IE XP images and found this VirtualBox forum thread with some explainations for those of you with the same problems. http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21712
Found an app which worked fine with the .exe files : http://www.unrarx.com/
hi, thanks for this tutorial – very helpful, however im a bit of a newbie and really only good with graphics and frontend code – i got to downloading ie6, 7, and 8 disk images, and got a bit confused when i click the link to take me to their download page – there is a huge list of .exe files – which do i download to proceed?
thankyou!
ps – is it poss to email a reply?
Emma
hey, i can’t download Q. is there an alternative to this? Please email me. Thanks.
This thread was a lifesaver. Thanks for posting!
I do have one question, though. Has anyone been able to get this to work with any of the Vista versions of IE? I have all three IE’s working in XP, but I could not get Zipeg to extract the VHD files from the Vista RAR downloads.
Found this solution for the licensing problem:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MJPZIMOH
Download and unrar the file
Zip the file and upload it somewhere where you can download it again
Launch your working version of IE through VirtualBox
Download the antiwpa.zip that you just uploaded
Extract it
Execute the cmd file that’s located within
The anoying activation trouble should disappear on restart
ATTENTION!!:
From PeteL’s post here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/archive/2009/04/30/vpc-s-are-coming.aspx
The latest VPC images that seem to be available now, as per the IE twitter page:
“Forgot to post the VPCs are up. Http://msdn.com/ie”
–8:54 AM May 3rd from Echofon
were from back in May…. as per the IE VPCs page here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en
The now posted VPCs were uploaded on 08/24/2009
Has anyone tried THIS release of VPC ?? Are you also getting the ‘Auth’ issues? Oddly enough, the images I have, are dated Sept. 20th…
Hi there
Thanks so much for this post! Am hoping it will solve my cross browser testing issues.
Does anyone know if the activation issue has been sorted? Also, which images should we use? There are .exe’s and .rars. The following are the options – do I need all of them?
IE6-XPSP3.exe contains a Windows XP SP3 with IE6 VHD file. Expires January 1, 2010
IE7-XPSP3.exe contains a Windows XP SP3 with IE7 VHD file. Expires January 1, 2010
IE8-XPSP3.exe contains a Windows XP SP3 with IE8 VHD file. Expires January 1, 2010
IE7-VIS1.exe+IE7-VIS2.rar+IE7-VIS3.rar contain a Vista Image with IE7 VHD file. Expires 120 days after first run.
IE8-VIS1.exe+IE8-VIS2.rar+IE8-VIS3.rar+IE8-VIS4.rar contain a Vista Image with IE8 VHD file. Expires 120 days after first run.
Thanks
I have another question please… what is a ‘blank prompt’ with regard to the terminal in step six? Like Shaun, I am not not familiar with the terminal and the instructions all seem like a foreign language to me! When I open the terminal the following information is displayed:
Last login: Tue Nov 24 06:58:39 on console
You have mail.
Unknown-00-24-36-b1-79-61:~ Lisa$
Where do I start typing the /Applications… path?
Thanks so much. Sorry if these questions are basic.
Lisa,
Regarding the activation issue, see my post two above yours. It will solve the problem.
I’m wondering, Andrew. Is it possible for you to post the finished product on here so some of us who are having difficulties can just download the .vdi from you? I mean there are still people out there who are going to indeed follow these steps due to curious nature. It would, however, be wonderful to have the .vdi ready to go for people whom are struggling. I for one am looking forward to completing this task, however I’m having trouble with step 6 and for some odd reason I’m left with a .raw file that is 8GB large. This is what I typed:
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc ~/Downloads/IE7-XPSP3.exe\ Folder/IE7\ on\ XP\ SP3.vhd ~/Downloads/IE7-XPSP3.exe\ Folder/IE7\ on\ XP\ SP3.raw
qemu-img: error while writing
Can you please tell me if there is something I’ve done wrong? Feel free to email me or answer the question here. ( A little bummed I can’t subscribe to this.)
Windows is telling me to reactivate because of significant changes, however I can’t hit any of the mouse buttons nor can I hit enter. Since I can’t get past that screen I can’t test this out properly, any suggestions?
I figured out what was wrong again, turns out I accidentally loaded the *.vhd instead of the *.vdi.
Double also, I cannot get windows to activate or connect over the internet.
Hi. Can I translate your tutorial to portuguese and put it on my blog?
I’ll surelly give the credits and link to this post.
Yes of course Bernardo
Had the same problem with no internet. If you go to the control panel and go to the Add Hardware wizard, it should find your ethernet adapter. Then just tell it to automatically find the drivers for you, and it should install them. After that, I had internet.
Hi There Andrew,
I am a newby to mac, but am looking to install ie7. is this safe
one more question.. i see we need to use ie6 ie7 ie8, I only need ie7, ie 8 effects my work site and I cant use it.. Do i still need to download ie8 disk images
i see we need to use ie6 ie7 ie8, I only need ie7, ie 8 effects my work site and I cant use it.. Do i still need to download ie8 disk images