Booting OSX from TimeMachine backup on a Windows Pc

[maxthackray]

Hi guys.

I'm trying to sort out a problem. I'm going travelling in April for a few months and I don't want to take my laptop with me as it's heavy and I don't want to risk theft or damage. I know that if you use a Time Machine backup to an external hard drive and plug the external drive into another Mac, you can boot the Mac from that drive and everything looks and feels as if it was your own Mac.

My question is, how can I do this from a PC? I am presuming that I am more likely to come across a PC in an internet cafe or something similar and I need to be able to boot OS X on a windows.

If anyone can help me out with this, I would be extremely grateful. Looking forward to your replies!
Thanks in advance

 

[Weaselboy]

Time Machine does not work quite like you are thinking. What you can do is boot to the Time Machine disk, but that just takes you to a recovery screen where you can restore to another Mac. This is typically used when installing a new hard drive for example. But that recovery screen is all you see, it does not actually boot into OS X where you could run apps etc. What you are thinking of is a clone. You can use either Disk Utility or apps like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your Mac to an external drive, and that can be used to boot to and operate normally like you mentioned. But even that is not going to work on a Windows PC at all.

 

[maxthackray]

Time Machine does not work quote like you are thinking. What you can do is boot to the Time Machine disk, but that just takes you to a recovery screen where you can restore to another Mac. This is typically used when installing a new hard drive for example. But that recovery screen is all you see, it does not actually boot into OS X where you could run apps etc. What you are thinking of is a clone. You can use either Disk Utility or apps like Carbon Copy Cloner to clones your Mac to an external drive, and that can be used to boot to and operate normally like you mentioned. But even that is not going to work on a Windows PC at all.

Thanks for your reply. Ok, I think I understand now. So, is there absolutely no way that I can boot OS X from an external harddrive with all my apps and files etc from a windows PC? perhaps not with time machine judging by your reply, but not at all??!!

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks for your reply. Ok, I think I understand now. So, is there absolutely no way that I can boot OS X from an external harddrive with all my apps and files etc from a windows PC? perhaps not with time machine judging by your reply, but not at all??!!

Nope... no way to do that.

What you could do just to access the data like documents is there are third party utilities for Windows that will allow you to read and write to a Mac formatted drive. Then you could at least use maybe documents and so on on the Mac drive, but no way are you going to be able to boot to it on a PC.

 

[maxthackray]

Nope... no way to do that.

What you could do just to access the data like documents is there are third party utilities for Windows that will allow you to read and write to a Mac formatted drive. Then you could at least use maybe documents and so on on the Mac drive, but no way are you going to be able to boot to it on a PC.

Ok. Thanks for clearing that up. Not the answer I was looking for, but if there's no way then there's no way. Thanks for your help

 

[felt.]

I took the hard drive out of my macbook pro and plugged it into my pc and it booted into OSX. It only required booting off a clover bootloader usb stick and having compatible hackintosh parts.

 

[adam9c1]

You can create external os x user on a use drive, but then the host needs to allow that
Or install os x on usb drive and bring that

But no that won't work plugged in to pc.

 

[old-wiz]

And internet cafes or a library will not allow you to change their systems like that.