Im about to make the switch over to mac (burn in hell Dell) and I've suddenly become aware of the fact that I cant just use my external hard drives with my new mac. I have read that it will be read only, does this mean that I wont be able to put these files on my mac? Can I only look and listen to these files? how can I get this information onto my new mac? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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PC external hard drive and new Mac
- Thread starter busterbluth
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Depends on how your external drives are formatted. If they're formatted to NTFS, then it's true, they'll be read only. However, if they're formatted to FAT-32 they'll be read and write.
There are several third party add ons for OS X which will allow reading and writing to NTFS drives. Note though, you can always re-format your external drives to the native Mac OS X file system, HFS + or even to FAT-32 if they're NTFS.
What kind of files are you planning to transfer to your new Mac? Unless they're Windows executable or Windows binary files, you can copy them over to your Mac via an external drive or a thumb drive, CD, DVD, etc.
Regards.
There are several third party add ons for OS X which will allow reading and writing to NTFS drives. Note though, you can always re-format your external drives to the native Mac OS X file system, HFS + or even to FAT-32 if they're NTFS.
What kind of files are you planning to transfer to your new Mac? Unless they're Windows executable or Windows binary files, you can copy them over to your Mac via an external drive or a thumb drive, CD, DVD, etc.
Regards.
Thanks for the reply.
Its mostly music, some word and excel documents, and ripped DVD movie files (which is why I dont want it done at MAC store). Will I be able to copy these files from a NTFS hard drive to my new MBP?
Thanks again for any help.
Its mostly music, some word and excel documents, and ripped DVD movie files (which is why I dont want it done at MAC store). Will I be able to copy these files from a NTFS hard drive to my new MBP?
Thanks again for any help.
Looks like you'll have to extract the files onto different HD then reformat it to HFS+. For more info: http://guides.macrumors.com/File_systems
Just download and install http://www.ntfs-3g.org and you can read and write to your external NTFS harddrive.
this is what i was going to suggest, though i did experience some bugs, that resulted in the drive not being mounted.
I would copy the file from the PC on the hard drive (if you still haven't). Then copy the content from the drive to the new mac (it's read only but you can copy them). Once you copied and checked that everything works as expected I would format the drive to HFS+ (or FAT32 if you still need to use it with a windows PC).
So basically you should be able to access the data on those drives and copy it to your new mac.
So basically you should be able to access the data on those drives and copy it to your new mac.