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Can I do this with my hard drive or should I just buy another?

J

jayeskreezy

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Ok so I have an IBM Thinkpad with I think a 20gb hard drive that I want to upgrade to 60gb. I was wondering though if I could remove the 20gb from my IBM laptop and purchase an external 2.5" or 3.5" enclosure(not sure which one it is) and make that an external hard drive that would be compatible as a storage device for both the IBM and a MAC. Would I need to reformat it since it has windows on it right now or would it be ok since it's only serving as a storage drive?

I dont know anything about this process so any and all help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂
 
You can do that just fine. Get an enclosure form newegg.com.

You will probably have to reformat it to FAT-32 though. Mac can only read, not write to NTFS (which I believe is the default format for Windows these days).
 
You will probably have to reformat it to FAT-32 though. Mac can only read, not write to NTFS (which I believe is the default format for Windows these days).
Click to expand...

so if I reformat it to FAT-32 it will be able to read and store stuff from a windows AND a mac computer?


also, which size is it? is it 2.5" or 3.5" for a laptop?
 
jayeskreezy said:
Ok so I have an IBM Thinkpad with I think a 20gb hard drive that I want to upgrade to 60gb. I was wondering though if I could remove the 20gb from my IBM laptop and purchase an external 2.5" or 3.5" enclosure(not sure which one it is) and make that an external hard drive that would be compatible as a storage device for both the IBM and a MAC. Would I need to reformat it since it has windows on it right now or would it be ok since it's only serving as a storage drive?

I dont know anything about this process so any and all help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂
Click to expand...

You could do that - it's probably a 2.5" drive. Look up pricegrabber.com -> computers -> accessories -> External Enclosures. You can get a 2.5" enclosure for $20.

Your current drive is almost certainly NTFS (Select "MyComputer"/"C: drive"/right click and "Properties" - it'll tell you the file system there), so unless there's something on it you want to keep, you should reformat to FAT32 if you're sharing it across different OSs. Reformatting it is easy.
 
jayeskreezy said:
so if I reformat it to FAT-32 it will be able to read and store stuff from a windows AND a mac computer?


also, which size is it? is it 2.5" or 3.5" for a laptop?
Click to expand...

It should be 2.5" but if you want to be absolutely sure, go to Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager and look at the entry for the disk drive. Then google for the hard drive.
 
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