EHD Question

[Periactoid]

Hey all!

I'm new to the Mac family, and I'm loving it! The only problem is that all my files are still on my old PC. I need an external hard drive anyway for back up, but I'm also looking into one so I can get all my files over to the new mac.

Here are a few that I was looking at:

Seagate

Iomega

I'm nervous with the Seagate one because it says it isn't compatible with Mac. Does that meant that I'd have to reformat it? Wouldn't that delete all of my files?

 

[miles01110]

I'm nervous with the Seagate one because it says it isn't compatible with Mac. Does that meant that I'd have to reformat it? Wouldn't that delete all of my files?

You'd have to format both of them most likely, but you'd do it as soon as you take it out of the box when you won't have any of your files on it yet.

 

[Periactoid]

Alright. I was just confused on the reformatting part, I thought that once you did that it'd only work for the mac.

And as far as the reformatting goes, should there be a disk or something that comes with it? And then to set it up with Time Machine all I have to do is hit 'choose back up disk' right?

 

[techound1]

Alright. I was just confused on the reformatting part, I thought that once you did that it'd only work for the mac.

And as far as the reformatting goes, should there be a disk or something that comes with it? And then to set it up with Time Machine all I have to do is hit 'choose back up disk' right?

Macs can read more formats than Windows machines can. You can use MS-DOS (FAT) and it will talk to both. You can use disk utility on your mac to reformat it. Windows also has a formatting utility - typically found under computer management. So...

1. plug the HD into your win machine
2. use computer management/ disk management to format it as FAT
3. dump your PC files onto the HD
4. plug the HD into your mac
5. make sure you did everything correctly and can access the files
6. reformat your PC for resale
7. move the files from the HD to the Mac
8. erase and reformat the HD to a Mac-centric one
9. set up time machine to use the HD as it's disk

 

[Periactoid]

Thanks for all your help. I ordered a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go drive yesterday. It connects via USB, but I hear that Seagate's are generally pretty fast anyway.

Oh, and if anyone is in the need of an external drive, they have some deals.

 

[Periactoid]

So I went to my computer, then to the drive, then to format but the 'MS-DOS' button was grey and I couldn't click. It's formatted as NFTS right now, can macs read that?