Old Imac Hard Drive

[Gabin]

hi vi have a old imac and i am working on a new pc i was think of using my old hard drive from my mac in my curent device and then using the m.2 i have in the rig im building

or havein the mac hardrive in the new system im building algon with the ssd

wich is possible?

and wich is better?

[BondiBlue]

I don't understand what it is you're asking, but if you're wondering if you can use the hard drive from your iMac in your new PC then that depends on the age of the iMac. 

[Euchre]

I am guessing you intend to format the iMac hard drive and blow away the data and OS. You'll need to repartition, as HFS isn't gonna play nice with Windows. If you do mean a magnetic media spinning hard disk drive, and not an SSD in the form factor of a SATA hard drive, I also hope your iMac isn't so old that it has a SCSI HD in it. Not many systems other than servers and Macs used SCSI natively, and finding an expansion card to support one may not be easy, and being bootable is another gamble.

[BondiBlue]

7 minutes ago, Euchre said:

I also hope your iMac isn't so old that it has a SCSI HD in it.

No iMac has ever used SCSI drives - they've all been IDE (G3, G4) or SATA (G5, all Intel). 

[Gabin]

20 hours ago, Euchre said:

I am guessing you intend to format the iMac hard drive and blow away the data and OS. You'll need to repartition, as HFS isn't gonna play nice with Windows. If you do mean a magnetic media spinning hard disk drive, and not an SSD in the form factor of a SATA hard drive, I also hope your iMac isn't so old that it has a SCSI HD in it. Not many systems other than servers and Macs used SCSI natively, and finding an expansion card to support one may not be easy, and being bootable is another gamble.

i want to use Mac os and Windows so could it work? if my ssd and hdd where in the same sysmtem and i just change the boot device evrytime i want to change?

and could it run the latest macos update?

[Blue4130]

4 minutes ago, Gabin said:

i want to use Mac os and Windows so could it work? if my ssd and hdd where in the same sysmtem and i just change the boot device evrytime i want to change?

and could it run the latest macos update?

No, you can't run Mac os on your pc. (I understand that hackintosh is a thing, but given the op's tech level, I don't see this as a valid option) 

[BondiBlue]

51 minutes ago, Gabin said:

i want to use Mac os and Windows so could it work? if my ssd and hdd where in the same sysmtem and i just change the boot device evrytime i want to change?

and could it run the latest macos update?

That's not how you go about running macOS on a PC. You can't just pull a drive from a Mac and boot from it in most cases. 

 

45 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

No, you can't run Mac os on your pc. 

Technically it is actually possible with a native macOS installation (I'm not talking about a Hackintosh), but in 99.9% of cases it won't work. 

[Blue4130]

On 12/22/2021 at 8:38 AM, BondiBlue said:

That's not how you go about running macOS on a PC. You can't just pull a drive from a Mac and boot from it in most cases. 

 

Technically it is actually possible with a native macOS installation (I'm not talking about a Hackintosh), but in 99.9% of cases it won't work. 

Excuse my ignorance, but what's the difference between hackintosh and native install on non apple hardware? 

[BondiBlue]

2 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Excuse my ignorance, but what's the difference between hackintosh and native install on non apple hardware? 

A Hackintosh uses some form of bootloader (Clover back in the day, OpenCore these days) to inject kexts (drivers) into the boot process. What I referred to as a native install is what you'd find on a proper Mac - macOS installed directly on the hard drive. It is technically possible for a native installation to boot without the use of a 3rd party bootloader on a non-Apple PC, but it's incredibly unlikely for that to work.