PC hard drive in a Mac?

You'll need to format the drives HFS+. Just pop (or plug) the drive in, open Disk Utility from Applications>Utilities. Select the drive and go the the erase tab. It'll reformat the drive. The process takes about 30 seconds max. Enjoy you new Mac! What kind did you go for?

Yes you can use your existing HDD. Before putting the drive into your new computer format it by writing zeros to the disk while it is in your pc. This will make it like it just came from the factory and has no file system on it. Even though you can format it FAT32, I would recomment formatting it in HFS+. This is easy to do, after you put the HDD in the Mac, navigate to:

Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. When in Disck Utility select the harddrive that you want to use on the left pane, then click the Erase tab on the right. Select "Mac OS Extended" from the Volume Format dropdown list, give it a name, and hit the erase button.

Thats it. Shouldn't take more than 3 minutes.

EDIT: Err, man i type slow.

If you have existing data files you need, you can read from FAT32 or NTFS. Once you copy your data, then reformat as HFS+ for the Mac.

what ma did you get and what type of drives do you have in your pc, if they are sata drives then they will work in a g5 is they are paralel drives they will work in a g4 powermac if you got a powerbook or an emac you will have to get an external caddy which are cheap just make sure you get a firewire one not usb

Kinda related question...

My company is throwing out an old puple iMac because (I think) the screen is dead. I am wondering if the hard drive inside could possibly be salvaged and put into my G4 tower? The same question goes for the RAM- I just feel like it's a waste if I can't salvage anything from this computer being tossed. Anybody know?

decksnap said:

My company is throwing out an old puple iMac because (I think) the screen is dead. I am wondering if the hard drive inside could possibly be salvaged and put into my G4 tower? The same question goes for the RAM- I just feel like it's a waste if I can't salvage anything from this computer being tossed. Anybody know?

Click to expand...

ram no. hd yes.

Wait a minute

blue&whiteman said:

ram no. hd yes.

Click to expand...

The G4 and even the G3 towers used 100/133 ram. I maybe mistaken but depending on the imac model it maybe worth a try. The HD will definitely work, and the question about you can really use any filesystem apple supports fat32 or UNIX or the Mac extended. If you want to transfer files it would be an easy time to do it if you format in Fat32.
Scott

You can use the drive, but I suspect its a small one like under 10 gigs. The RAM no. Some iMacs used SODIMMS, others used slower RAm. The G4 tower is either 100 or 133 depending on age. I do not think any iMac ever used 133 DIMMS in the CRT form.

decksnap said:

My company is throwing out an old puple iMac because (I think) the screen is dead. I am wondering if the hard drive inside could possibly be salvaged and put into my G4 tower? The same question goes for the RAM- I just feel like it's a waste if I can't salvage anything from this computer being tossed. Anybody know?

Click to expand...

that imac would be either a 266 or 333mhz since its grape in color. 233-333 imacs used pc66 memory because of the 66mhz system bus. you can use 100 in a 66 machine but it would still only run at 66mhz. any G4 tower is pc100+.

Thanks...

Thanks a lot. I'll crack it open and see how big the drive is. There's actually a chance it's a blue iMac- only saw it for a second as they were lugging it to the dumpster. Yes, I'm going diving!

HD ok , RAM not

decksnap said:

My company is throwing out an old puple iMac because (I think) the screen is dead. I am wondering if the hard drive inside could possibly be salvaged and put into my G4 tower? The same question goes for the RAM- I just feel like it's a waste if I can't salvage anything from this computer being tossed. Anybody know?

Click to expand...

This happened to my Tangerine iMac G3 333 a few years ago. I bought a G4 dual and used the ata 66 HD from the iMac and it works fine. It was only a 6Gb drive but I use it for audio recording.

As for the RAM, the iMac definately uses Sodims and they will not fit in the G4 tower.

aussie_geek