Can you do a hackintosh without removing any windows data?

[Aguero]

Hey, my father loves the design of os x yosemite but unfortunately we can not afford a mac, his birthday is coming up and I want to suprise him by having os x AND windows together without losing windows data since we have important things on it. Is it possible? and how?

 

[Solandri]

Usually people who want to run both just run one inside a virtual machine. VMWare or VirtualBox if your main OS is Windows. Parallels if your main OS is OS X (VMWare Fusion is the equivalent product for OS X, but from what I hear, Parallels is a little better implemented).

You are not supposed to run the desktop version of OS X on non-Apple hardware. This includes inside a virtual machine. It's possible (just like with a hackintosh), but technically it's illegal. One way to legally get around this restriction is by getting the server version of OS X. It is allowed in a VM. I don't know how it differs from the desktop version though.

Just make sure whatever CPU you buy supports VT-x. That's necessary for running a 64-bit OS inside a virtual machine. VT-d can be nice too, but not necessary. And obviously you will need enough memory for both Windows and OS X to be running simultaneously. A SSD for both OSes helps tremendously too.