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Boot USB mac to Windows laptop

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  • 19-04-2017 9:13pm
    #1
    Wilko121
    Registered Users Posts: 183 ✭✭


    Hi Everyone, 
    Bit of a long shot here, so my mac recently bricked and i have my HDD in an enclosure. 
    I can boot from usb on another mac to load my on HDD. 
    Can this be done on a windows machine?
    Mac os HDD usb to Windows laptop, and boot up mac OS?


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    #2
    stevek93
    Registered Users Posts: 3,088 ✭✭✭stevek93


    What?


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    #3
    Wilko121
    Registered Users Posts: 183 ✭✭Wilko121


    so right now i have my old hdd in a usb enclosure, when i boot my friends mac i boot from usb and my machine loads. 
    can this be done on a windows based machine?


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    #4
    stevek93
    Registered Users Posts: 3,088 ✭✭✭stevek93


    Wilko121 wrote: »
    so right now i have my old hdd in a usb enclosure, when i boot my friends mac i boot from usb and my machine loads. 
    can this be done on a windows based machine?

    Being bluntly honest no. Not much more I can say I don't know much about Mac's but what I would advise to get whatever data you need from the hard drive.

    I'd imagine you can plug it into your friends machine copy files onto their machine then format your external drive to NTFS and move files back across you can then access them on a windows machine.


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    #5
    ZENER
    Registered Users Posts: 6,163 ✭✭✭ZENER


    Wilko121 wrote: »
    Hi Everyone, 
    Bit of a long shot here, so my mac recently bricked and i have my HDD in an enclosure. 
    I can boot from usb on another mac to load my on HDD. 
    Can this be done on a windows machine?
    Mac os HDD usb to Windows laptop, and boot up mac OS?

    Short answer is no. A standard PC won't be able to boot from a Mac drive without some fiddling, e.g. Hackintosh.

    As for reading your disk on a Windows machine, again, probably no. Windows and MacOSX use different methods of formatting on their system drives. MacOSX uses HFS while Windows 10 will use NTFS. You can read an NTFS disk on a Mac but not write to it natively without some extra software.

    Last time I checked Windows can't read or write to HFS formatted disks, so I don't imagine plugging your Mac drive via USB into a Windows machine will yield much other than Windows saying the Drive needs to be initialised.

    However you can install a utility to Windows which will allow it to understand Mac formatted disks. Have a read of this for more info.

    Ken


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