best way to move everything over

[OrangeCuse44]

Hey all, lifelong windows user and happily just purchased a new MacBook online. I was wondering, with the exception of an external hard drive, what the best way would be to move all my music, photos, and word files from my Dell to the MacBook would be?

 

[WildCowboy]

Do you have an iPod? How about transferring data over a network?

 

[mkrishnan]

Ethernet cable would be my suggestion... set the Windows computer to share its HD and then plug a cable up between it and the Mac. You don't need a crossover cable. If you can see the XP computer, you're ready to go. Otherwise, either install Bonjour on Windows, or System Prefs -> Sharing -> Internet, turn this on and set it to share via Ethernet. Then run Directory Access and make sure you're set to the same Workgroup, and you should see the Windows computer on your Mac.

 

[OrangeCuse44]

Great, thats exactly what i was looking for. Thanks a lot!

 

[bpm2000]

Since it seems the question has been answered, hopefully you wont mind a little piggybacking.

Im doing the same thing, except I want to move most of my media files to an external HD. I am going to reformat this drive (its in fat right now) to HFS when I get my macbook - should I just do the same procedure, just into the external drive?

I am planning on running parallels as well - if I want to access the music on my HFS external drive via Windows under parallels, can I just access it from there or do I need to create a "shared folder" and copy ALL of those files over? I just want to minimize redundancies where I can.

thx

 

[charkshark]

Ethernet cable would be my suggestion... set the Windows computer to share its HD and then plug a cable up between it and the Mac. You don't need a crossover cable. If you can see the XP computer, you're ready to go. Otherwise, either install Bonjour on Windows, or System Prefs -> Sharing -> Internet, turn this on and set it to share via Ethernet. Then run Directory Access and make sure you're set to the same Workgroup, and you should see the Windows computer on your Mac.

I also strongly recommend this method, quite fast as well.

 

[mkrishnan]

Im doing the same thing, except I want to move most of my media files to an external HD. I am going to reformat this drive (its in fat right now) to HFS when I get my macbook - should I just do the same procedure, just into the external drive?

I am planning on running parallels as well - if I want to access the music on my HFS external drive via Windows under parallels, can I just access it from there or do I need to create a "shared folder" and copy ALL of those files over? I just want to minimize redundancies where I can.

Sorry, I read your questions but I honestly just didn't understand them.

You have an external FAT drive with media files on it? With a USB2 or FW plug? You can just plug it into the Mac and it will mount read/write in OS X with no further actions. If you want to reformat it as HFS, probably you have to make a copy of the files on another hard drive before reformatting it. But you really don't *need* to unless you need journaling, file permissions, or files w/ individual size >4GB.

With respect to parallels, I have to defer, as I have no experience. You can probably use aliases if nothing else to avoid actually copying files to the share folder.

 

[c23roo]

Thanks for the help... Strange, this thread didn't come up when I looked about for this information... But I digress...

How, exactly, do I set up my PC to share its HD? I'm running Win ME on thie old dinosaur, and I have forgotten how to go about this. Forgive me, I'm not feeling too bright right now...

 

[charkshark]

Ethernet cable would be my suggestion... set the Windows computer to share its HD and then plug a cable up between it and the Mac. You don't need a crossover cable. If you can see the XP computer, you're ready to go. Otherwise, either install Bonjour on Windows, or System Prefs -> Sharing -> Internet, turn this on and set it to share via Ethernet. Then run Directory Access and make sure you're set to the same Workgroup, and you should see the Windows computer on your Mac.

Just another vote for ethernet. If you can't do it, and have an iPod, use it via disk mode, really quite fast as well.