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Switching between OSX and Windows with rescue media USB flash drive

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Can I restore a Windows 8.1/10 ATI 2015 backup image file to a SSD drive with OSX (HFS+) and vice versa, through the rescue media USB flash drive created by ATH 2015 windows version?

I just testing the two OSs, and want to be able to switch between them rather quickly (I don`t want the bootcamp etc. solutions for now because I already have two ATH images of these OSs).

 

 

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Nimrod,

As far as I know, no.  Win 8.1/10.1 doesn't boot natively on HFS+ formatted drives.  At a minimum, you'd have to parition off the drive and format a section of it as NTFS for any Windows OS to even have a place to be recovered to.  

Acronis USB bootable media will have no issue restoring a Windows image to the NTFS parition after that.  However, not sure if it will be bootable on such a configuration from within a Mac - that's what bootcamp is supposed to take care of - making both OS available to the bios so you can boot from one or the other.  On Windows-only machines, you still have to have a properly configured bootloader to be able to pick the desired OS for a dual boot system, but Mac bootloader is outside my scope of knowledge.  

What would/should work (although may not be ideal for your setup)...  

Take a time machine backup of your existing OS X install (or a system image from the pre-boot version of OS X disk utility - I still use Yosemite version for this because El Capitan no longer lets you image just the used data portion like you could in Yosemite) and recover it to an external USB 3.0 hard drive or thunderbolt drive.  It will still be plenty quick and OS X boots from an external drive, same as it ever was - just fine.  You could then install Windows directly to the internal drive.  To switch between the 2 drives, just press and hold the "option" key at boot and pick which hard drive you want to boot to.  

In the above scenario, the Mac has to be on the external drive as Windows does not support booting from external drives (natively).  If you want to kee the Mac drive internal and try to get Windows to boot externally, you could create a Windows-to-Go installation.  Micrisofot only officially supports this with Enterprise versions of the installers.  However, there are third paty tools (link below) that do this with your regular Windwos installers (home and/or Pro) and they are free.  I've never tried booting a Windows-to-Go external drive on a Mac before - would be insteresting if it did work. 

Learn How to Create Windows 10/8 Bootable USB Drive with AOMEI Partition Assistant