Move my old drive to a new Mac

[photolaz]

Ok...off we go to a first post as a new member and a new MAC convert.
I'm trying to get everything set up on the Mac Pro to start using it instead of my old PC. My Mac came with Fusion and Vista Ultimate installed but I haven't registered it yet. I want to take my main drive out of the PC and put it in to the Mac and use Fusion to go back and forth until I'm comfortable with the Mac. The drive is not an SATA and I have XP Pro on it which i would rather keep it than try using Vista with some of my old apps and hardware. So first things first, is this possible and where to I find info on how to procede. Thanks in advance!

 

[photolaz]

Well I guess I either in the wrong part of the forum or what I want to do can't be done. Thanks

 

[spinne1]

Ok...off we go to a first post as a new member and a new MAC convert.
I'm trying to get everything set up on the Mac Pro to start using it instead of my old PC. My Mac came with Fusion and Vista Ultimate installed but I haven't registered it yet. I want to take my main drive out of the PC and put it in to the Mac and use Fusion to go back and forth until I'm comfortable with the Mac. The drive is not an SATA and I have XP Pro on it which i would rather keep it than try using Vista with some of my old apps and hardware. So first things first, is this possible and where to I find info on how to procede. Thanks in advance!

No, you can't put your PATA drive in your Mac Pro. You can however put it in an external firewire PATA hard drive enclosure and hook it to the Mac Pro via firewire (DON'T BUY JUST A USB 2.0 ENCLOSURE--there are some potential issues you may run into later using such). Your drive is likely NTFS which means you'll need to use some software to read/write it on a Mac. Look here:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/


After all is hooked up you can select your external HD as your boot camp drive for running windows from within your Mac. You can also undoubtedly select your external drive as your fusion windows OS. But you'll have to read your fusion documentation to be sure and for details on how to do it.

 

[photolaz]

Thanks, I really appreciate the reply.