External Hard Drive (old windows drive)

[GoCubsGo]

Hi all. I have two 80gb hard drives in my windows pc. The other day something happened which really mad me think that it was time to remove one of the 80gb drives. Long story short I went out and bought an external hard drive enclosure. I did not get a firewire enclosure, as I do not have FW on my pc. If I need to transfer I'll need USB 2.0. At any rate, this is an 80gig drive that has never seen an OS of any sorts. It was always used for my photographs and my music.

I want to take the drive, mount it in the external enclosure and plug it into my powerbook. Can this be done without needing to format it or something like that? It would seem to me that it would see it as another drive under disk utility like my compact flash card reader is seen. I know I should take the time to back up everything just in case, but I'd kind of like to not have to do that today.

Thanks!

 

[yellow]

You should have sprung for an enclosure that supported both USB and Firewire.. Hopefully the PC has USB 2.0? Does your laptop have USB 2.0? If not, file transfer will be painfully slow (if it works at all).

The hard drive will have been formated for use with Windows, so it's either FAT32 or NTFS. If it's FAT32, the Mac will have no problem reading/writing to it. If it's NTFS, unless you have Panther, your Mac won't see it, and even Panther has "limited writing capabilities" to NTFS drives, so don't count on writing files to it.

 

[GoCubsGo]

It wasn't an issue of money. It was that I don't have Firewire on my desktop but I have it on my Mac. Plus I figured if it were too slow I'd go back.
The drive is formatted NTFS. I have panther.

Are you saying that ther is no possible way to use an external drive on both a mac and pc and have write capabilities for both?

You should have sprung for an enclosure that supported both USB and Firewire.. Hopefully the PC has USB 2.0? Does your laptop have USB 2.0? If not, file transfer will be painfully slow (if it works at all).

The hard drive will have been formated for use with Windows, so it's either FAT32 or NTFS. If it's FAT32, the Mac will have no problem reading/writing to it. If it's NTFS, unless you have Panther, your Mac won't see it, and even Panther has "limited writing capabilities" to NTFS drives, so don't count on writing files to it.

 

[yellow]

Are you saying that ther is no possible way to use an external drive on both a mac and pc and have write capabilities for both?

You could have gotten an external case that supported both firewire and USB2.

But anyway, yes, I'm saying that there's no possible way to use an NTFS drive in a satisfactory way for both your Mac and your PC. Maybe Tiger will have full NTFS w/r capabilities, but Panther doesn't.. only read (90% of the time) and write (25% of the time). If you reformat your hard drive for FAT32, then you will have no problems (this is what your flash drive is formatted with).

 

[GoCubsGo]

Thanks. It is for sure ntfs so I will backup to another hdd format to fat32 and then use it that way.
Thanks for your help.