Does it work to buy an HD with OSX on in?

[Natalia]

I want to do some iPhone development, but I don't have a Mac.

Can I just buy a HD off of eBay that already has OSX Lion on it, stick it in my PC, and choose to boot from that HD from the BIOS?

[Planet]

Most likely it will not work like you want it to. Check out these guides on Hackintosh.

http://www.hackintosh.com/

[Natalia]

Most likely it will not work like you want it to. Check out these guides on Hackintosh.

http://www.hackintosh.com/

Wow, that's quite a bit of steps. But it looks like I can do that all on an external HD and then just plug that into my PC whenever I need to boot into OSX?

[dairyFarmer]

Yes once it is setup you can just plug the hard drive in, and boot OSX. But the setup does take many steps, is hit and miss based on your hardware chipsets/revisions etc. And there is no way you could just buy it pre-configured, for your machine.

For example Radeon 4850's are supposed to be supported fairly easily with OSX, but mine was an ASUS card and this somehow made the process of getting fully accelerated graphics impossible.

[Natalia]

Yes once it is setup you can just plug the hard drive in, and boot OSX. But the setup does take many steps, is hit and miss based on your hardware chipsets/revisions etc. And there is no way you could just buy it pre-configured, for your machine.

For example Radeon 4850's are supposed to be supported fairly easily with OSX, but mine was an ASUS card and this somehow made the process of getting fully accelerated graphics impossible.

Is there anyway to run a check to see if your hardware will work?
I know MSFT was nice enough to make something like that...........

[dairyFarmer]

Apple control the hardware and the software so don't care much....but the community has compiled Hardware Compatability Lists (HCL) for recent versions of OSX on the site http://wiki.osx86project.org (right side of homepage)

[Charles Wirth]

I have had good luck with firing up intel/mac loaded HD with iBoot or rBoot, worth trying if you have the drive already.

Hackintosh is the other method, it is not too complicated if you know how to burn cd's