Infotaxis Blog

I know that this is nothing new, but now that Leopard’s come out I feel that a new awareness should be spread.

It is easily possible to run MAC OS X 10.4 or 10.5 on a PC. This is made possible by special patches that allow it to boot and install on non-MAC hardware. The rest is already compatible, since MAC has switched to x86 architecture.

I cannot tell you where or how to attain these patches, but I’ll say that there are pre-patched disk images “floating around the net”.

If you try one of these images, in order to fit onto a normal DVDR, the printer drivers and additional languages have been removed. It is essential that you untick the options to install them at the “Customize Install” section of installation. Also note that only certain hardware can be installed on. While we can install drivers for things like my Geforce 8800 GTX, or a network card, we can’t convince the installer to see IDE controllers it doesn’t like. If you’re a MAC expert, perhaps you could, but the typical Windows user certainly can’t!

Take notice that MAC OS X does not like many PC IDE controllers. Thusly, you cannot install it from an IDE DVD drive, and depending on your controller, to an IDE HDD. Use a USB->IDE adapter/enclosure (this is what I did) or dd it to a bootable media like a separate HDD (untested).

You can tell if it doesn’t like your source because it will either give you a blinking cursor, or say that the root device isn’t found, or one of a few errors it can give. It will either see no HDDs in diskpart, or give you an error as the disk boots if it cannot see your HDDs.

I currently am dual-booting Vista x86 Ultimate and MAC OS X 10.5. This is achieved using the Vista boot loader, and a file known as “tboot”. With a series of bcdedit commands, one can tell the Vista boot loader to contain an entry for Mac OS X, and target this file, which will boot from it:

bcdedit /create /d "Mac OS X" /application bootsector 

Here you will be given an ID, which you can insert where I say "ID" below... 

bcdedit /set ID device bootbcdedit /set IDpath tbootbcdedit /displayorder ID /addlast

If you’re on XP, put the tboot where ntldr is, and you can put this in your boot.ini:d

c:tboot="Mac OS X"

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 8:17 pm and is filed under articles, mac, technical. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.