I have leopard installed on an external hard drive and I have a pc laying around so i'll try it and get back to you.
EDIT: Does anyone know how to get to the boot menu on a pc in order to boot from an external?
I'm not sure if you'd be able to do it from an external drive, but it is possible to boot OS X on a PC. However you need very specific components and either an EFI emulator or the internal dongle EFI-X. I just built an i7 Core system and dual boot OS X and Windows. Very quick and no glitches that I've encountered yet.
Has anyone ever successfully installed OS X on an external usb hard drive and than booted from it on a PC?
Nope, can't do it. The only external drive you could possibly boot from is an eSATA drive.
I would have sworn I did this a a year ago with Linux testing. Also found this:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/ht/bootusbflash.htm?rd=1
That also claims it is possible. I don't have my USB drive installed with a bootable OS any longer so cannot test.
I know for certain you can boot from USB flash drives.
I do actually own an eSata external drive. Can you explain how to go aobut using that?
Which motherboard do you have on your i7 system? I have P6T Deluxe.. I am wanting to get osx loaded on my i7 system. Have a link of the basic guide (sure if took multiple sources, but a link to get me started) you used to get osx loaded?
Has anyone ever successfully installed OS X on an external usb hard drive and than booted from it on a PC?
If you want to boot by USB, then you must build a custom boot loader to do so. Macs rely on their EFI for this information (which isn't found on PCs), thus you need to make a customized hackintosh boot drive for such things. Simply installing OS X onto a USB drive won't give you a bootable drive without the additional mods. On the other hand, installing onto an eSATA drive (using Boot 132 or Universal Installer) can work quite easily, provided your PC is hackintosh-friendly.
I also have a Core i7 system with the ex58 board by gigabyte and wasn't able to successfully install OS X on it. What distribution/settings did you use?
This talk of cloning and bootloaders is somewhat new and confusing to me. Here are the steps I've currently tried:
1) Plug USB drive into PC
2) Put Kalway distro cd in drive
3) Boot to Kalway cd
This doesn't work however as I can't even get to the install screen using this disk. I'm going to try and use another distro. I've heard people have had success with Leo4All V3 or IAtkos v1.0ir2 with an Inspiron 1420. Any other suggestions?
I would like to boot to OSX with this laptop.
http://www.amazon.com/A73E-AH51-17-3-Inch-Versatile-Entertainment-Laptop/dp/B005UUS5L6/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Would it be easier to do it to a 2nd internal drive bay with either a SSD or standard internal HDD, or to an external drive?