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Assistance with PC to Mac

N

nstreet16

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 1, 2009
15
0
Hey Guys,

so I'm going to be transitioning from PC to Mac (Dell Laptop to MBP) and I had a couple of questions I hope you can assist me with.

1) I have an external hard drive, will I lose all data if I connect it to the MBP? It is formatted as NTFS. I was gonna use the external HD to transfer all my data to the Mac.
----Sub question 1a: If I can't connect it w/o losing all data, is there a way I can keep the data on there w/o losing it during the reformatting process?

2) I have an iPhone 3G and was wondering, if I connect it to my mac, will I lose everything on my phone (data, music, etc...)? Or should I be fine with connecting it from PC to mac w/o having to reformat or etc...?
----Sub question 2a: what program is good to use if I need to extract all music from the iphone?

3) While I understand this is personal, VMWare Fusion or Parallels or Bootcamp?

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!!!
 
nstreet16 said:
Hey Guys,

so I'm going to be transitioning from PC to Mac (Dell Laptop to MBP) and I had a couple of questions I hope you can assist me with.

1) I have an external hard drive, will I lose all data if I connect it to the MBP? It is formatted as NTFS. I was gonna use the external HD to transfer all my data to the Mac.
----Sub question 1a: If I can't connect it w/o losing all data, is there a way I can keep the data on there w/o losing it during the reformatting process?

2) I have an iPhone 3G and was wondering, if I connect it to my mac, will I lose everything on my phone (data, music, etc...)? Or should I be fine with connecting it from PC to mac w/o having to reformat or etc...?
----Sub question 2a: what program is good to use if I need to extract all music from the iphone?

3) While I understand this is personal, VMWare Fusion or Parallels or Bootcamp?

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!!!
Click to expand...
1. Nope, mac can read windows, windows just cant read mac formated hds.
2.Yes. You would need to reformat.
2a:someone else?
 
aimbdd said:
1. Nope, mac can read windows, windows just cant read mac formated hds.
2.Yes. You would need to reformat.
2a:someone else?
Click to expand...

An addendum to your first answer... Macs cannot write to NTFS unless you use NTFS-3G or the following:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

I tested this for a bit and it seemed to work just fine.

You can use Senuti (in OSX) or Sharepod (in Windows) to extract songs from your device.
 
nstreet16 said:
1) I have an external hard drive, will I lose all data if I connect it to the MBP? It is formatted as NTFS. I was gonna use the external HD to transfer all my data to the Mac.
----Sub question 1a: If I can't connect it w/o losing all data, is there a way I can keep the data on there w/o losing it during the reformatting process?

2) I have an iPhone 3G and was wondering, if I connect it to my mac, will I lose everything on my phone (data, music, etc...)? Or should I be fine with connecting it from PC to mac w/o having to reformat or etc...?
----Sub question 2a: what program is good to use if I need to extract all music from the iphone?
Click to expand...

1.) What I did was put everything I wanted to transfer onto my external hd and then connected to Mac and copied everything to it. After everything was transferred I then reformatted the external to HFS+ for the Mac.

2.) I took my entire iTunes folder off the PC and inserted it where Mac keeps it's iTunes folder and synced the phone with the new Mac. If you want to use a program that will extract from the phone and put onto the Mac I have heard good things about Senuti. You can google it for site.
 
1. Macs can read data from NTFS drives. (Macs cannot, however, write to NTFS.) Thus, you shouldn't have to reformat just for the purpose of migrating.

2 has already been answered somewhat; I'll skip to 3.

3. If you need maximum FPS or maximum compatibility for gaming or other high-performance Windows apps, Bootcamp is the best, as it runs Windows natively and not in emulation.

If you're only using Windows for MS Office or other application that's not particularly taxing, then either Parallels or VMWare should do the trick, and allow the convenience of running OS X and Windows side by side without a reboot.
 
RRmalvado said:
An addendum to your first answer... Macs cannot write to NTFS unless you use NTFS-3G or the following:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

I tested this for a bit and it seemed to work just fine.

You can use Senuti (in OSX) or Sharepod (in Windows) to extract songs from your device.
Click to expand...

I have an old seagate freeagent 320gb external hard drive. I believe paragon was never on this particular one. So does that mean ntfs-3g is on it? If not, then i guess for the purposes of connecting it, then migrating is fine and just reformatting afterwards. although, i'll probably have to then transfer everything back onto the hard drive after the reformat.

Sharepod it is... cuz i'm probably gonna have to remove all the songs off my phone first (some of them got deleted a long time ago and so what i have on my phone are the only copies).
 
dXTC said:
3. If you need maximum FPS or maximum compatibility for gaming or other high-performance Windows apps, Bootcamp is the best, as it runs Windows natively and not in emulation.
Click to expand...


Fusion and Parallels are NOT emulation, they use virtualization this is totally different. Emulation is just that it emulates, virtualization well you need to look it up but it is 100% different and performs dramatically better than an emulator.


The OP doesn't say how he/she intends to use Windows however if they're going to be using it as a gaming platform then I agree Boot Camp is the way to go if they are just going to be running some other apps then either Parallels or Fusion would be great. One isn't "better" than the other, right now they are direct competitors.
 
nstreet16 said:
Hey Guys,

so I'm going to be transitioning from PC to Mac (Dell Laptop to MBP) and I had a couple of questions I hope you can assist me with.

1) I have an external hard drive, will I lose all data if I connect it to the MBP? It is formatted as NTFS. I was gonna use the external HD to transfer all my data to the Mac.
----Sub question 1a: If I can't connect it w/o losing all data, is there a way I can keep the data on there w/o losing it during the reformatting process?

2) I have an iPhone 3G and was wondering, if I connect it to my mac, will I lose everything on my phone (data, music, etc...)? Or should I be fine with connecting it from PC to mac w/o having to reformat or etc...?
----Sub question 2a: what program is good to use if I need to extract all music from the iphone?

3) While I understand this is personal, VMWare Fusion or Parallels or Bootcamp?

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!!!
Click to expand...
1)You won't lose anything.
1a)see above
2)Your best plan would be to migrate your itunes library AND your iphone backups to the mac before connecting it to the mac, and to be extra cautious, I would extract the music from it using some third party software to be on the safe side, though technicallly,if your library on the PC was synced with the PC, all your songs are on both the PC and the iPhone, migrating your library would, like the ads say, "just work".
2a)I don't have an answer to that, I just copy pasted it over the ethernet, rebuilt my itunes library and I was up and running in about an hour.
3)Parallels and VMWare are quite similar, they are virtual machines that run within OS X, so a lot of RAM is needed as your computer runs 2 OS'es. They are fine for most things. If you need all the power you can get from your hardware, say for gaming, CAD, photoshop, then I highly suggest bootcamp instead. Either option requires you to have a valid windows(xp, vista or 7) copy in hand.
 
rkaufmann87 said:
The OP doesn't say how he/she intends to use Windows however if they're going to be using it as a gaming platform then I agree Boot Camp is the way to go if they are just going to be running some other apps then either Parallels or Fusion would be great. One isn't "better" than the other, right now they are direct competitors.
Click to expand...

correct, i haven't specified what i intend on using it for. I wanted to use it for programs that I wouldn't otherwise be able to use on a mac. Although I'm sure I can find some freeware to take care of those solutions. I guess my biggest concern was on bootcamp, can I share files across platforms? Like edit/delete a file or pull one from the other without having a problem?

As for the external hard drive, it was readable but couldn't write to it. Now I just gotta figure out how I'm gonna get my really large files to my new external hard drive that I bought for the mac on black friday. And the iphone situation, didn't ask me to reformat anything yet. so everything looks good so far. although i haven't had much playtime with my laptop. Been focused on moving everything over.

Any suggestions???
 
nstreet16 said:
correct, i haven't specified what i intend on using it for. I wanted to use it for programs that I wouldn't otherwise be able to use on a mac. Although I'm sure I can find some freeware to take care of those solutions. I guess my biggest concern was on bootcamp, can I share files across platforms? Like edit/delete a file or pull one from the other without having a problem?

As for the external hard drive, it was readable but couldn't write to it. Now I just gotta figure out how I'm gonna get my really large files to my new external hard drive that I bought for the mac on black friday. And the iphone situation, didn't ask me to reformat anything yet. so everything looks good so far. although i haven't had much playtime with my laptop. Been focused on moving everything over.

Any suggestions???
Click to expand...

I believe if you copy the whole itunes folder, it will sync as if it was on the old computer with no problem and no complete restore of everything.

Also, I have had Parallels 5 and 6...both suck and the support is horrible, forget about the forum also as they dont publish the thread unless it says PARALLELS IS AWESOME all through it. I currently use bootcamp with Windows XP due to 7s driver signing issues but I did have 7 x86 and 7 x64 along with Windows Server 2003 (Couldn't figure the internet setup out so I gave up on it) and now have Windows XP x86 and it works great. When running bootcamp, you can see and copy files from the mac partition and also do this while on osx (see and copy from bootcamp partition).

Too tired to think of how to move a large file...maybe throw it on a flash drive?
 
tjb1 said:
When running bootcamp, you can see and copy files from the mac partition and also do this while on osx (see and copy from bootcamp partition).
Click to expand...

So basically, if I want to pull a file and edit it, I would have to copy it over onto the windows 7 side of the bootcamp and do what i needed with it, then copy it back over when i was done with it? is there a limit to how much of windows 7 partition i can do before i cant write anything to either drive? if that makes any sense. is there a gb limit when setting up bootcamp that i can't edit or copy files over inbetween each other?

second question is, so i managed to connect my iphone 3g without problems, it copied the contacts and all that over to the address book and ical. however, if i want to sync my apps, it says i'll have to start/replace with the app data on the computer (all of which i copied over from my pc via external hard drive). does that mean all the progress i made on angry birds or settings/files/stuff like that will be loss? when syncing apps from my MBP instead of my dell?
 
nstreet16 said:
So basically, if I want to pull a file and edit it, I would have to copy it over onto the windows 7 side of the bootcamp and do what i needed with it, then copy it back over when i was done with it? is there a limit to how much of windows 7 partition i can do before i cant write anything to either drive? if that makes any sense. is there a gb limit when setting up bootcamp that i can't edit or copy files over inbetween each other?

second question is, so i managed to connect my iphone 3g without problems, it copied the contacts and all that over to the address book and ical. however, if i want to sync my apps, it says i'll have to start/replace with the app data on the computer (all of which i copied over from my pc via external hard drive). does that mean all the progress i made on angry birds or settings/files/stuff like that will be loss? when syncing apps from my MBP instead of my dell?
Click to expand...

I have no idea what will happen with the apps...did you copy everything iTunes? What I do is install iTunes, go to the music folder and just replace that whole folder with the one I copied.

And im not sure what your asking first but when you make bootcamp you pick the partition sizes. There is a program called camptune that supposedly allows you to adjust the partition sizes after you have already made them. As far as copying over I think thats the only way you can do it is by copying and pasting, I dont go into my Windows side much so I cant really tell you much about moving stuff over and back because I dont need any of the windows documents on the mac side 99% of the time. But I would definitely say stay away from Emulation or Virtualization if you plan on doing anything above solitaire. I was doing CAD programs like AutoCAD and Mastercam and it just killed OS X performance to make Windows run decent, and after going to bootcamp the CAD programs run flawless.
 
I have had no problems what so ever with parallels 5 and 6, but I guess YMMV. I prefer it over bootcamp, being able to swap back and forth right away is great.
 
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