MacBook Pro 13 - Hard Drive full - Maxtor OneTouch 4

[Wren523]

Hi - because of not enough space on my hd, I have been unable to get updates, until yesterday, when I deleted Microsoft Windows Office for Mac. But I'm going to have to put it back soon. When we had an HP Pavilion Desktop, we had this Maxtor OneTouch 4 attached to it, so it's formatted for Windows. Can I change the formatting and not lose the stuff put on when using Windows? Prob not, right? So, I should get a new external drive? How do you decide whether to get an external drive or increase you hard drive? Thank you for your patience.

 

[spinnerlys]

Connect that old beast (Maxtor ... 4) to your Mac and right click on it to see what FORMAT it uses.

If it is MS-DOS (also called FAT32) you can read and write to it, but the maximum file size is 4GB.

If it is Window NT Filesystem (NTFS) then you can only read it, but with the help of NTFS-3G drivers, you can also write to NTFS formatted volumes.

Also have a look at this guide on external HDDs.
http://guides.macrumors.com/External_Hard_Drives

Or this guide about file systems.
http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems

Depending on your MacBook you can get any 2.5" S-ATA HDD with a maximum height of 9.5mm (or 12.5mm with the Unibodies) to put it inside your MacBook.
Then you can get an external USB enclosure and use the old internal HDD as storage or backup.