External Windows HDD on Mac??

[harry65]

Hi All -

My Windows machine finally bit the dust and I finally got a Mac Book However, I still have a lot of data on my old Windows drives that I can no longer get to because my computer will not boot up (I think mobo problems).

My question is this: If I get an external drive enclosure, put a Windows formatted drive in it (my boot drive and another non-boot one), and hook this up to my Mac Book via USB, will I be able to see all of the stuff on the Windows drive and copy it to my Mac Book (photos, iTunes songs, docs, etc.)? Or do I need to do something else to get at that data?

Thanks.

 

[skottichan]

Hi All -

My Windows machine finally bit the dust and I finally got a Mac Book However, I still have a lot of data on my old Windows drives that I can no longer get to because my computer will not boot up (I think mobo problems).

My question is this: If I get an external drive enclosure, put a Windows formatted drive in it (my boot drive and another non-boot one), and hook this up to my Mac Book via USB, will I be able to see all of the stuff on the Windows drive and copy it to my Mac Book (photos, iTunes songs, docs, etc.)? Or do I need to do something else to get at that data?

Thanks.

Short answer, yes.


Assuming the drive is formatted NTFS, it'll only be one way though. Meaning you'll be able to copy from the external to your MacBook's harddrive, not the other way around. With that said, once you get your stuff off your old hard drive, you can format it to HFS and use the external for your Time Machine backups.

 

[harry65]

Great! Thanks!! I think that will be my path forward rather than paying someone to get the data for me.

I have NTFS partitions, FAT32, and ext3 (or whatever Linux uses). Hopefully I'll be able to see all three, but at least the NTFS one will get me most of my data.

 

[skottichan]

Great! Thanks!! I think that will be my path forward rather than paying someone to get the data for me.

I have NTFS partitions, FAT32, and ext3 (or whatever Linux uses). Hopefully I'll be able to see all three, but at least the NTFS one will get me most of my data.

Yeah, it'll read/write FAT, not sure about the linux base, possibly, but I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than myself can help

 

[old-wiz]

there are extensions to OSx to read the ext2 and ext3 partitions - try google for 'mac osx ext3', but I've never tried it.

 

[velocityg4]

You can also use Macfuse with NTFS-3G to read/write to NTFS.