Read a Windows drive on OSX

[steveflash]

Hi folks!

I stumbled across an old PC of mine the other day I thought had been thrown out. I took the Sata drives out of it and would love to have a look on them.

I'm now on a 2011 Macbook pro running Lion.

My question is if i buy a USB drive caddy for the eSata drives, will my Mac read them? I don't want to boot windows on them, i just want to have a look at some of my old files.

I would have performed a fairly standard install of windows XP at the time, so is it just the same as having a Fat32 drive that I can read but not write to?

Cheers for any help!

 

[maflynn]

OSX has the ability to read NTFS volumes, you just can't write to them. if you wish for write access you'll need some third party applications

 

[AcesHigh87]

Hi folks!

I stumbled across an old PC of mine the other day I thought had been thrown out. I took the Sata drives out of it and would love to have a look on them.

I'm now on a 2011 Macbook pro running Lion.

My question is if i buy a USB drive caddy for the eSata drives, will my Mac read them? I don't want to boot windows on them, i just want to have a look at some of my old files.

I would have performed a fairly standard install of windows XP at the time, so is it just the same as having a Fat32 drive that I can read but not write to?

Cheers for any help!

FAT32 drives actually have read and write on both mac and PC so if it is FAT you're in luck.

Far more likely though is that the drive is formatted as NTFS which, as maflynn said, your mac can read so if you just want to look at the files you can. However if you want to write to the drive you would need a program like Paragon NTFS or Tuxera NTFS

 

[steveflash]

Thanks guys! Just the answer i was hoping for!!

 

[MacPC]

If you just need to migrate files from the old PC drive, copy the necessary files to your Mac first, then reformat the drive to Mac format then tou can use this drive as an external USB drive for Time Machine backup.
However, if you want to use the Windows applications, you won't be able to use them directly on your Mac. You will need either install a copy of Windows on the Boot Camp, or better yet, use a Virtual Machine such as VMWare's Fusion, Parallel
or VirtualBox--I think this one is still free