What worse could happen to the hardware?
 

Hello All,

I am planning to walk on same path as all of you experts here by installing Hackintosh. Before I do that, I thought, I should clear up few questions (and save my bottom/relationship etc. etc.)

My machine specs are as follows -
Athlon 64 (V) 3400+ 2.2 GHz,
Motherboard - MS-7184,
AC97 Audio Controller (Realtek ALC658C 6-channel CODEC chipset) ,
ATI Radeon Xpress 200,
Realtek 8100C Onboard LAN,
1GB RAM,
250GB SATA (but planning to use 60GB IDE connected through SATA-to-IDE connector as I don't want to mess up with my original drive),
Pioneer DVD burner,
PS2 keyboard and mouse,
6 USB & 2 firewire ports
Memory cards reader

I checked in HCL and I found that my system is compatible, except ATI Radeon Xpress 200. No trace of this hardware to be found satisfactorily. I plan to use either of XxX_x86_10.5.6 or Zeph or iDeneb (Any recommendation, taking into account the hardware, is most appreciated.)

I plan to use 60GB HDD through SATA-to-IDE connector, as many have reported across different Hackintosh forums that SATA has got some issue or have to play with the BIOS. I am very scared to play with it and to avoid any messing up with the BIOS, I plan to use IDE drive.
Any suggestions/recommendations here?

Lastly, lets say, I am the most unlucky guy and this work messes up my machine a big time. What worse could happen? Is there any chance that such attempt will render my machine completely useless, frying up hardware or something?
The reason why I say this is, I really love Mac but being a grad student and a father, not so much cash is flowing around. My wife has promised to gift me a mac when I graduate, till then I should leave our only desktop working alive. But I can't wait and want to give a try. Should this messes up, my wife will slit my throat, if not, I will be in a BIG trouble. Please advise if I should venture into this..

Thanks for taking your time to answer my questions.

no way this can kill your hardware :) the worst it will do is render the HDD unbootable until you fully reformat it :) so make sure you either do it on an external HDD or a seperate HDD so you dont effect the one with Windows installed on it :)

Goodluck with the install :)
and welcome to InfiniteMac :)

Aydinz is right. You can't fry your machine with incompatible software. What worse could happen? I disconnected a VGA cable from a flaky motherboard (Windows build for someone else) a few days ago. The power supply threw sparks out of the back and went up in smoke. Now that's scary! But it had nothing to do with the software.

Thanks folks, I will give a try.

Comments on other 2 questions i.e. distributions and SATA issue are most welcome.