It’s fairly common these days to find dual boot systems running various OSes. Since Apple has moved to Intel processors is it possible to build a dual boot Windows PC and Mac system? I appreciate that there might be issues with some hardware/drivers but it might be an interesting project.

Yes – there is even a specific Apple application to set it all up for you on the Apple website. You just need a Windows install disc

Rachel

I assume you don’t mean on a mac ? macs have a thing called bootcamp where you can run windows on boot up. Alternatively you can run windows alongside OS with Paralells.

Sorry, yes I was thinking of adding an Apple OS to my current PC, not the other was around.

I did the same thing a couple of years back, there is a website hackintosh which gives you all the steps. I currently have a VM image of OSX Lion which I use at work running on a windows 7 laptop. Works great. The Hackintosh thing was a real pig to get working, I gave up eventually, but things might have got better since. Ive now got a macbook anyway and wouldn’t go back to Windows except for work issue stuff.

My Hackintosh is great, but I was lucky to pick hardware that was pretty much 100% Mac compatible. Still took a lot of messing about and advice from Tony Mac’s OSX forum. The perceived wisdom is you add MacOs first then windows. Once I got Snow leopard running there didn’t seem to be any point having windows. (Especially as Leopard was £20 as opposed to £130 for windows 7)

There is no official way to do this on a non-Apple system. As said though, you can go the “hackintosh” route and get it to install. The chances of any random box of bits working perfectly is pretty low though, and the more hardware you have that’s different to what’s in an iMac, Mac Pro or Mini, the more bodging things you have to do and the greater chance of an update breaking your system horribly.

PJay, before you go any further, what is your current hardware? If it’s a laptop, or a prebuilt desktop, it could quite frankly be a bit of a nightmare (though some prebuitls are known to work well). If it’s a custome build, then details on the system will help you to decipher whether it’s going to be easy or not.

I decided a while back that I wanted a Hackintosh. Well, actually I wanted a Mac Pro, but that was about £1700 more than I wanted to spend new, and even 2nd hand 5 year old models were fetching nearly £1k! So I decided “how hard can it be” in Top Gear style, and spent £300(ish) on parts for the project. If everything failed, at least I’d still get a good Windows PC out of it!

I’m sat here, 12 months on, typing on the machine I built running OSX. It’s not been 100% plain sailing, but it was a whole lot simpler than I imagined it might be. The key though is in choosing components that you know will work before hand. I shopped mainly for 2nd hand bits (it’s amazing what you can get for little money from serial upgraders!) on ebay, but I was careful to choose a Motherboard that was known to be an easy install (Gigabyte are best here), a Core2 or newer processor is needed, only certain Nvidia graphics cards seem to work ok (though my 8800GTX worked straight away, as it’s what some Mac Pro’s came with) but most ATI work without issues. And those are the key issues to worry about. Any old box will do, PSU just needs enough power, DVD readers/writers can be a bit temperamental but anything from the big makes like Sony seem to work ok.

There are several different ways of doing the install too, but I found the easiest way for me (once I’d chosen all the compatible parts) was the popular TonyMac method. Spend some time on the TonyMac and InsanelyMac forums, and have a look through the OSX86 Wiki to look for compatible parts and machines. The install itself was a relative breeze, only slightly more involved than doing a fresh install on an Apple branded computer, and less time intensive than installing windows! Then when its installed you need to do a few patches to get everything working as it should be, but that’s all relatively easy too. What I will say is though to treat it as an unstable system, and do quite a few backups. I’ve done stupid things a couple of times now, and made the system unstable and had to do a complete reinstall, thus losing all my data. They were my own stupid fault, but you sometimes need to safeguard against your own stupidity!

Oh, and if you do end up doing a dual OS install (though I doubt you’ll ever want to use Windows), for gods sake install the OS’s and their relevant data on different hard drives! Don’t partition one drive to do it all. If one OS goes down, and you’ve got to wipe it, it would at least be sensible to have installed it on a seperate drive so you can still run the other OS. Oh, and as mentioned above, install OSX first. Then when that’s done, unplug the HD, plug in a different HD, and install Windows on that, so there’s no confusion as to what is what. When you’ve then installed windows, plug the OSX HD back in, and in the BIOS enable the OSX disc as the primary boot drive, then when the bootloader runs it will ask you which operating system you want to run.

Hope that’s helped!

If you’ve got any more specific questions, fire away…

Well it sounds like it might be an interesting project at some point but clearly not as simple as just installing a second OS (and if I do try it at some point I’ll bear in mind a second harddrive rather than a partition).

My hardware is okay and happilly running Windows 7. It’s a desktop setup based around an Intel i5 (quad core) and 4 gigs DDR3 ram (2 slots free for more ram). I’ve a Radeon 5750 gfx card and a Creative X-Fi soundcard; it’s all plugged into an ASUS P7P55D motherboard.

At the moment it’s just a ‘maybe’ but it’s good to know that it can be done.

I got a dual boot hackintosh up and running with an HP G62 but the Intel HD graphics wasn’t supported and I totally failed to get my wireless to work

Gave up in the end

Edit. I seem to remember the i5 and radion might have a good chance

Well it sounds like it might be an interesting project at some point but clearly not as simple as just installing a second OS (and if I do try it at some point I’ll bear in mind a second harddrive rather than a partition).

Apple didn’t design their software to be easily hacked, they designed it to work well on their own branded machines so they could sell more of them!

My hardware is okay and happilly running Windows 7. It’s a desktop setup based around an Intel i5 (quad core) and 4 gigs DDR3 ram (2 slots free for more ram). I’ve a Radeon 5750 gfx card and a Creative X-Fi soundcard; it’s all plugged into an ASUS P7P55D motherboard.

Pretty sure that motherboard works quite well in a Hackintosh setup. In fact, just googled it, it seems to be a reasonably popular mobo for a Hackintosh conversion. The Radeon 5750 will work out of the box, as that’s what the last gen iMac’s had fitted anyway so all the drivers will be in OSX. It should all work pretty well, the only thing I’m not so sure on would be your Creative X-Fi soundcard, but there’s probably a workaround for that somewhere on the internet. If not, you’d just have to revert to onboard sound when on OSX.

Now I’ve remembered, wireless card compatibility can also be a big issue for Hackintoshes. Again, you just need to check the list of approved models on OSX86, TonyMac or Insanely Mac forums. Have a search on there, there’ll be guides on how other people have converted their own P7P55D’s to run OSX too, so you’ll not be alone, and they can be a fairly helpful bunch at times.