Using an existing Mac HD image on non-Apple hardware
 

Does anyone know if it's possible to use an existing Leopard drive image, write it to a hack-mac drive, and perform some magic to get it to boot on non-apple H/W? Is this at all possible? A boot-loader of some description?

I figure it must be, as there seems to be tools that fit the description, but couldn't find any experiences of people that have done so and documented it.

I have a well-maintained image that's used across the Macs here, and it would be a real shame to start again from scratch.

Cheers

Beav

Yes and no depending upon your knowledge of the system this will be implemented on and what system the imaged drive is from.

If you are able to implement a bootloader (like munky's "Boot-EFI") located in the EFI partition on a GUID partitioned disk and have the necessary Extensions in place to support the new non-Apple hardware, then you could just "restore" the image to the partition the bootloader points to.

I believe you should also be able to implement the new Chameleon bootloader much the same way as munky's in order to get that GUI-feel as well as the other new features found within it.

nfoav8or: That's some very useful info. Just what I was looking for.

Cheers!

yes very true. I've seen what your asking been done before u need an ibook G3 (NOT! G4) and a pc with around 300mhz 32ram and 50gb hard drive for things to work obviously you would have better specifications then that but at bare minimum.

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I wanted to quickly update this thread.

I'm currently using my iMac HD image with great success on the new hackmac hardware.

Wrote Chameleon to the drive, added EFI strings for vid card, removed a kext, added a few new ones for wireless/audio/shutdown support. Everything works 100% (aside from sleep). Total time invested: 5-6 hours including assembly.

The other forums out there are pretty messy, there's conflicting advice/articles everywhere. It's challenging to distil the info down to "known working" advice. The contributed noise from the masses is crazy. I almost miss the dark days when nobody was messing with osx86, the days when every second post wasn't someone wanting to be spoon-fed. Generally speaking, most issues can be resolved with a bit of reading and research, and people just don't seem to try.

I hope Infinite Mac continues to evolve in to place with quality posts and articles over quantity.

Hardware is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3L, Gigabyte 9400GT/512mb, 8gb of Kingston something-x 1066 DDR, TP-Link WN-650G wifi, and of course the Q9550.

I had to settle for a video card with a fan. This will need to be fixed, along with a quiet case fan.

Noob question here. I'm about to do the same thing with the hard drive from my old iMac. I suspected all that would have to be done is something like running Universal OSX86 Installer on the drive to install the bootloader and extensions, so I did that before disconnecting the drive, applying the package for the motherboard I planned to buy. But now I bought a slightly different motherboard (Gigabyte P35-DS3R instead of DS3L) and want to clean up that drive before hooking it up. Also want to try using the P35 Control Center as well, which should be easier to play around with. So which directories do I go into to delete all currently installed kexts?