laptop to mac help

[labguitar1003]

ok so my brother is going to be giving me his old laptop but he has to order a new hard drive for it.

so my question is can i install mac leopard on the laptop with a hard drive that has no operating system?
P.S. the laptop meets all the requirements spec wise for the os

 

[Steve_Karl]

Sure. I can't imagine why not. I do it all the time with PCs and XP, Vista and Win 7.
All you really need to know is how to tell the laptop how to boot from the CDROM. It's probably in the boot order in the BIOS.
Set it to be CDROM first, the Hard Hard drive.

 

[Dan025]

ok so my brother is going to be giving me his old laptop but he has to order a new hard drive for it.

so my question is can i install mac leopard on the laptop with a hard drive that has no operating system?
P.S. the laptop meets all the requirements spec wise for the os

as long as you are absolutely sure that there is hardware support in leopard for all the important systems and that mac doesn't have proprietary firmware on there hardware that will prevent leopard on other systems. i dont know much about mac so i cant tell you for sure but it wouldn't surprise me if apple would do this sort of thing.

on a side note if it all fails you can go the ubuntu route. ubuntu 10.10 is super fast and recent versions haven't left much to be desired. it is really very complete and easy to use and install. i only say ubuntu over mint which i use because ubuntu leaves the stock configurations in gnome which s similar to mac. it has an over head panel and window control on the left. with some playing around with panel widgets and objects you can pretty much replicate osx without the annoying features there are likely several mac like dock bars in the package manager as well but again i dont use them. you also have compiz fusion to customze further with cool animations and gestures and hotheys. i personally use kde instead of gnome and wont go back. kde widgets and stock features give me all the functionality and good looks i can want without the annoyances of using osx or customizing knome with compiz.

 

[jackthehack]

It's NOWHERE that easy at all...

Check these links:

http://www.hackint0sh.org/
http://www.hackintosh.com/

Here's a bit dates laptop compatibility guide: http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2/Portables

As can be seen from that guide, even if you can get the system to load OS X and boot, most systems will have some non-operational hardware, or will require additional patching to work either semi or fully functionally.

 

[jimh]

Yup. Hackintosh is your friend!

 

[Graffiti62]

What kind of laptop is it, and how old is it?

 

[Dan025]

i knew jack would have a better answer. might i ask though is there a specific need for leopard? or just a preference?

 

[labguitar1003]

What kind of laptop is it, and how old is it?

its a dell inspiron 1545

 

[Graffiti62]

That shouldn't give you any new funky things aside from what you'd see on Hackintosh. This should be interesting, like having a Volvo engine in a Monte Carlo, or Alembic electronics on a Fender Strat. I know how the Mac system works well enough to troubleshoot most problems, but my biggest fear is that you may still bump into the odd driver issue here or there. I've seen a guy modify linux drivers to get printers to work on a Mac, but he literally went into the programming of the driver to do it, which is the one thing I hate doing, and is not the way I like getting things to work, as this keeps you from re-creating a solution on your own for future events if you don't happen to have the disk.