Can you take a hard drive with OSX on it and plug it into a PC?

[O Possum]

Okay, this is a bit of an odd question, I know.

Long story short, my old imac stopped working, I assumed it was a hdd problem so I bought a new one and re-installed all my files from time machine. It worked okay...except it randomly crashes every now and then.

So now I am assuming the problem was with not only the old hdd (had been giving SMART warnings for a while) but also with the hardware in the imac. At least, I'm pretty sure the hardware is done for. I can't think of anything I did wrong during the hdd install other than accidentally drop one of the tiny screws into the case because of all the magnets' interfering. I don't think this would hurt it, as it didn't land anywhere near the motherboard.

These files and programs are pretty important to me so I was wondering if I could just take my hdd out of the imac and put it in one of the trays in my PC and hook the cables into it. Or would I have to wipe the drive again, and go through the long process of migrating all the files from the time machine backup into the new drive. again.

I'd really appreciate an answer. This has been driving me batty.

 

[DarkSable]

You would not be able to plug it into the new computer and boot into OSX... but you might be able to plug it in, boot into windows, and read the files from it. I'm not 100% positive, since I don't work with macs much, but it's worth a shot.

 

[Mr5oh]

Windows I believe requires a program to read MAC drives, it does not do it natively.

Linux can read them, but there are some limitations on write options in some cases. Either way using a live Linux distro you could read / copy the files onto another drive / Windows.

Once you have your files, should be able to reformat to another file system and use it like any other hard drive.

 

[Willem0]

i don`t know for sure, but your computer won't reconize it as Mac OS, because of the mobo, if i'm right mac have special mobos that allow them to execute mac os, so forget about starting mac os on your normal pc.
You can plug it in your pc (if it has a Sata/IDE Plug)
You can search for programs to view your mac files on your windows.

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

You can try a program like Macdrive from Mediafour to try and retrieve some files from the hard drive but you can't boot OSX from a windows PC - Macs use proprietary hardware so unless you are willing to Hackintosh your windows PC you are stuck with windows apps that can read HFS+ file systems.

 

[itech1]

Okay, this is a bit of an odd question, I know.

Long story short, my old imac stopped working, I assumed it was a hdd problem so I bought a new one and re-installed all my files from time machine. It worked okay...except it randomly crashes every now and then.

So now I am assuming the problem was with not only the old hdd (had been giving SMART warnings for a while) but also with the hardware in the imac. At least, I'm pretty sure the hardware is done for. I can't think of anything I did wrong during the hdd install other than accidentally drop one of the tiny screws into the case because of all the magnets' interfering. I don't think this would hurt it, as it didn't land anywhere near the motherboard.

These files and programs are pretty important to me so I was wondering if I could just take my hdd out of the imac and put it in one of the trays in my PC and hook the cables into it. Or would I have to wipe the drive again, and go through the long process of migrating all the files from the time machine backup into the new drive. again.

I'd really appreciate an answer. This has been driving me batty.

 

[itech1]

Yes you can! That is about all that you can do though as Windows does not recognize the Mac format and thus can't read anything on the drive until you reformat the drive for Windows and that destroys the Mac format and OS X. Your computer crashing could be from any number of reasons and most likely is not related to the hard drive. Have you tried checking for loose connections? Different RAM modules?