old pc hard drives connected to macbook pro

[just1nd20]

I have two old hard drives from windows xp machines (one laptop, one desktop). the desktop is so slow it is unusable and the laptop is dead (wont turn on). I want to move data from both drives to my new macbook. Is there any way to do this. I've heard of, and may not understand, how to slave a hard drive, but I have not learned if this is possible between different operating systems. I've only been using OS X for a week now so forgive my ignorance.

Just so everyone knows, file sharing on my network is not an option given how terribly old and dead these old computers are. Thank you for reading.

 

[spinnerlys]

You need to find out what interface those HDDs use.

IDE (P-ATA) - on HDDs until the mid 2000s

3.5" HDD - desktop

2.5" HDD - laptop

S-ATA - in most modern HDDs

3.5" HDD

2.5" HDD

If you have both interface types, use this to connect the bare HDD (which you have removed from the computers to do so) via USB to your Mac.

Mac OS X is able to read from those HDDs as it understands the file systems used by Windows, FAT32 and NTFS. But it can only write to FAT32 formatted volumes, to do so with NTFS formatted ones, one needs NTFS-3G drivers.

 

[just1nd20]

Thanks for the help. I'll have to give it a try and see.