Do it yourself external HDD question?

[BilltheCat]

I have a HDD that came out of my now dead Dell. bios fail that all model 4800's get but not warranteed. (how special)

anyway, The 120gig hdd is a seagate Barracuda ultra ata 120gigs model 7200.7

I was thinking of an external enclosure to see if I can archive my music and documents off the drive. It is NTFS formatted XP Pro.

Can my iMac read it ok? I want to get my files off then maybe format. I was thinking about trying to make it a crossover boot drive in xp but then cannot see any reason to ever want windows again in my life!

Should this drive and format work ok as an external short term? any special needs or tricks I need to know about? Thanks!

 

[caligula357]

the imac should be able to read the drive ok, but you won't be able to do anything except read (and copy the files) over to your mac.

you could format it as fat 32, instead of ntfs, as mac, pc and linux can all read/write to this.

note, you might want to look at something like partition magic to do this...

 

[NuDarwin]

hmmm. i would also recommend fat32 if you want it be read by more than one platform. but remember, macs can only boot HFS+, so if there is any possibility of you wanting to do this, an HFS+ drive is necessary.

If I might recommend an enclosure,

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW911UPL/

these are the best. I've used one for a while, and it's absolutely perfect. Nobody who I've talked to who has one has ever had any problems with it.

 

[BilltheCat]

Thanks both of you. I have a cheapie case coming to try out. I primarily wanted it just to try the hdd out and see if its ok and to try to get my files off.

After that I am possibly gonna go for a couple of 500's or so one at a time of course. Like I *need* 500 or a terabye at all!

but the idea of having it so easily with OSX is tempting. Seems the LaCie drives are well thought of around here.

Thanks again!