[Windows 8.1] System Image Recovery

[AppleGeek911]

I'm probably going to be selling my Dell Inspiron 5520 soon - I recently purchased a MacBook Air and got a Hackintosh install up and running on my desktop. I have ~250GB of data on the Inspiron that I'd like to transfer over to a drive on my Hackintosh. I figured that the easiest way to do this would be through a Windows System Image.

Low and behold, Microsoft and their infinite(ly small) knowledge makes things difficult once again. The Inspiron 5520 uses UEFI and my Hackintosh uses BIOS - making the task seemingly impossible. Is there any way to get around this? Thanks.

 

[Solandri]

Normally I'd say turn the Inspiron into a virtual machine with VMWare converter and play it back on the new system with VMWare Player. But I don't think VMWare makes a free player for OS X. You can try VMWare Fusion for free, but I suspect it's time-limited. And I don't know if Parallels (the other big OS X virtualization software) can read VMWare converter images.

Anyways, maybe this will give you some ideas to explore. Also, you probably know this if you've set up a Hackintosh, but OS X can read NTFS but not write it, and Windows cannot read nor write HFS+. If you want a disk that can be read and written by both, it should be formatted as exFAT. (Or you can buy software to allow one OS to read/write the other OS' disk format.)