I have had the most difficult time figuring out whether my time capsule flash drive will be able to restore from a Linux partitioned HDD or not. As a high school graduation gift, I received a MacBook Pro (13", mid 2012), and I've been wanting to load Arch Linux on it ever since I opened the box. In my efforts to fully backup Mac OSX, last night, I created a time capsule on a USB3 32GB flash drive, which took about 9 hours (I even disabled the system-wide spotlight service.), not a big deal, though. Anyways... So, I guess, by default, the Time Capsule's file system is (case-sensitive) journaled HFS+, in order to be bootable by an Intel-based Mac. What I don't understand is that, after I wipe the whole 750GB HDD, and repartition it within Arch:
- will the hold-Option-key-at-startup thing still be there? Is that a part of the Apple EFI BIOS? I know that on my PCs, I can still enter the little boot menu to boot from a storage device
- And install a bootloader, will I be able to boot from my flash drive time capsule?
- And even before all of that, what does the time capsule do anyway? Is it the complete OS, and can I restore OS X on a blank HDD with it? (I didn't exclude the system files, however you do that.)
So here's the bottom-line: **I just want to be able to restore my MacBook Pro to OSX, even after using Arch as the only OS on my system.