PC to Mac data recovery

[tyba]

My PC decided to die this week without warning (I'm writing this on my PS3 right now)... which is ok seeing as I've wanted a Mac for awhile now. My question is if I'll have a hard time transfering data from my PC hard drive if I place it in an external drive enclosure and connect it to the Mac Book I plan to buy this week? If this won't work I'm open to suggestions...

 

[jroad]

You didn't specify which part of the PC 'died'. Assuming the hard drive is properly functioning, Mac OS X can natively read/write Fat32 and read(only) NTFS drives.

 

[tyba]

lets just assume the drive is operational... i had a win xp pc from Dell... which format do you think the drive is formatted in?

 

[Bobbi Flekman]

I would bet it is formatted as NTFS. XP has a preference for NTFS formatted discs, and you'll have to consciously select FAT32 to have the thing formatted in non-NTFS.

I am not so sure about jroad's comment that NTFS is Read Only as I have moved more than 100 GB from a Mac to Windows 2000 in NTFS and vice versa. So far I haven't seen anything weird with it.

As you are planning to move it from XP to OS X it shouldn't be a problem though.

One tip: copy the files using the Mac, not the PC. A "little design flaw" I noticed during the move is that Windows doesn't like it when the complete path becomes larger than 256 characters, as opposed to OS X that will scream at you when the directory becomes larger than 256 characters.

Good luck.

 

[jroad]

I am not so sure about jroad's comment that NTFS is Read Only as I have moved more than 100 GB from a Mac to Windows 2000 in NTFS and vice versa. So far I haven't seen anything weird with it.

As noted in this hint for Tiger, NTFS disks are mounted read-only. Leopard did not change this behavior. The NTFS protocol is proprietary to Microsoft, however there are now write-capable workarounds for OS X, such as MacFUSE.

The OP was asking about native access through an external enclosure. I presume you were able to write to an NTFS partition though networking, which abstracts the filesystem to a degree where OS X and NTFS cooperate.

 

[Bobbi Flekman]

I presume you were able to write to an NTFS partition though networking, which abstracts the filesystem to a degree where OS X and NTFS cooperate.

I was talking about networking that's right.
1. If all the guy really wants to do is move data from Windows to OS X Read-Only should be enough.
2. As you already ask, which part is dead? It might be that he can load the computer into networking and get his data through networking the drive.