If you want to test exploits against windows machines or if you’re a web developer and need to test code in IE 7, 8, and 9 you will want to have multiple windows virtual machines handy. This tutorial will show you how to legally get copies of windows installed on virtualbox using the free editions provided by Microsoft. These additions are not fully registered and you will need to restore the images after every 30 days so they aren’t useful for desktop machines but they are perfect for testing purposes.

This will produce the following virtual machines:

We will be using a script to automate the build process courtesy of Greg Thornton and it is available via github at https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh. The admin password for all of the IE VMs is “Password1″ without the quotes. This has been tested and confirmed to work with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Instructions

Step 1: Download and install VirtualBox
Step 2: Launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/)
Step 3: Run the installation script, this will take some time to download and install

Step 4: Launch VirtualBox and boot one of the virtual machine

Recovering from a failed installation

Each version is installed into a subdirectory of “~/.ievms/vhd/“. If the installation fails for any reason (corrupted download, for instance), delete the version-specific subdirectory and rerun the install. If nothing else, you can delete “~/.ievms“ and rerun the install.