Question MacOS from HDD to originally Windows PC

[voxel_3]

I have an old hard drive that I took from a 2010-era Macbook Air. I also have an old HP Envy desktop that I would like to use for some coding; however, I am working with Swift and I can't use Xcode on a windows PC... I only have windows computers, so I was curious if anyone knew of a way to use the Mac HDD to boot MacOS on the HP PC. I know that these computers have completely different file types, so I can't just hook up the HDD through SATA, but I was wondering if there was a way to read the HDD and then MacOS as the boot OS for the PC. My other course of action would be to just get MacOS on a VM, which would work for what I want to do, but I also love to tinker with old computers so my inclination is to try out the Hackintosh. If it's not worth the hassle and I should just go with a VM, candidly tell me please. Thanks!

 

[CelicaGT]

It is extremely difficult and often impossible to get macOS to run on "PC" hardware. Even if you get it working you would spend more time keeping it working through various macOS updates for it to be worthwhile. If you want to go that route I would suggest joining a Hackintosh forum to find out if your hardware is even compatible.

 

[Joseph_138]

If Apple never wrote drivers for the hardware that is installed in your PC, then you won't be able to use those components under MacOS. Apple does not write separate driver files for hardware, that can be swapped out, when you make a change, like Windows does. All the drivers are included in the OS itself, and you can't patch in new drivers for unsupported hardware. Even if you could, MacOS does not run unsigned drivers, and Apple will not sign off on drivers for hardware that they don't want supported. Apple also does not maintain a lengthy backward compatibility list of supported hardware when they move from one version to the next, like Windows does. Your PC would have to be equipped IDENTICALLY to some known Mac model that is supported under the version of MacOS that you want to use, to make sure that everything works, and even then you will still likely have issues that are difficult, or impossible to solve. Even the chipset on your motherboard could cause incompatibility issues, if it was never used in any Mac model. A newer, but not necessarily brand new, Macbook may be your best choice here, rather than trying to get your Macbook drive to work in a PC.