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use external drive with mac and pc?? files recognised by both>

B

bob2131

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
hi
i have two external hard drives, with stuff from my pc on them.

can i plug them into my macbook? and just copy files?
usb hard drives.

one i think is one or the other, mac or pc, not both at same time, unless i partition and format i think. maybe the other one too.

i have a 8gb file on my pc, im trying to get into my macbook.
how can i???

i have a 160gb ipod, its only 30gb full, and pc says not enough space on it.
why is this???? the file is only 8gb......and theres over 100gb free on my ipod.

anyone help?

cheers
 
It depends on the current format of the disk. If they're FAT your Mac can both read and write to that disk; if the disk is NTFS you Mac will be able to read bit now write.

I, personally, would just plug it in and see if it works.
 
As he said, if the drive is a FAT partition both should be able to read it just fine. If it's partitioned NTSF then it might be tricky on the Mac side of things; I last recall hearing that NTSF was proprietary for M$ and Apple couldn't read it, but that was a few years ago.

I would recommend putting the file back on your PC, and then format your USB external drive on your Mac choosing HFS+. Then, install MacDrive on your PC so it can read and write to an HFS+ drive. After you've done that you can move the file back from the PC to the drive, and then to your Mac.

Yeah, that's a few steps but I think you're better off having your drives formatted HFS+.
 
guys......thanks so much.

some of that i dont even understand fully.

but i jsut plugged in my external drive into macbook, and it recognised all the pc data on it!!!!! awsome!!!!!

the 1TB drive was jsut to back pc up.....cause i was so paranoid it would die any day.......so now i can just pick and choose stuff and put onto my macbook. just explore it in finder and drag and drop files right??? drag and drop just copies files?

(i have another 250gb external drive, so probably format that specifically for macbook backing up, when time machine back up. thsi is to external drive yeah? not internal??
does time machine clone the whole system, or just back up files???
like norton ghost or like syncback on pc......
 
You can exclude certain files/folders in Time Machine preferences as shown here:
 

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I need to transfer all my files from the Pc to a Mac when i get one. This wil include Photo's mucis documents and video. Will I have any problems putting these onto the Mac, as they are not system files or applications, and both Pc's and Mac's can use these files.

NStocks
 
Here's the skinny.. Leopard actually can read and copy from NTFS volumes, it just can't write to or change files on those drives. So, if all you're doing is copying files FROM the ntfs to the Mac, then you should be good to go. Just don't expect to write to the drive until you format it or get a 3rd party utility.
 
belunos said:
Here's the skinny.. Leopard actually can read and copy from NTFS volumes, it just can't write to or change files on those drives. So, if all you're doing is copying files FROM the ntfs to the Mac, then you should be good to go. Just don't expect to write to the drive until you format it or get a 3rd party utility.
Click to expand...

hi
ive got a 250gb external usb drive ive used for pc back ups.
i dont need those back ups anymore.
i wanna use it specifically with time machine and new macbook.

someone said to format it with disk utility in leopard..........is this correct?
i can format it and use it like this?

can someone explain the basics of how to do this??
 
bob2131 said:
hi
ive got a 250gb external usb drive ive used for pc back ups.
i dont need those back ups anymore.
i wanna use it specifically with time machine and new macbook.

someone said to format it with disk utility in leopard..........is this correct?
i can format it and use it like this?

can someone explain the basics of how to do this??
Click to expand...

Plug the drive in
Open Disk Utility from Applications : Utilities
Choose the correct hard drive from the list on the left
Choose Erase
Choose Macintosh Extended (Journaled) as your formatting type

Or open Disk Utility and choose Disk Utility Help from the Help menu

Or
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh14.html
 
CanadaRAM said:
Plug the drive in
Open Disk Utility from Applications : Utilities
Choose the correct hard drive from the list on the left
Choose Erase
Choose Macintosh Extended (Journaled) as your formatting type

Or open Disk Utility and choose Disk Utility Help from the Help menu

Or
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh14.html
Click to expand...

hi
i did what you said...and it all went bad....man.....
when i said to erase, it said unable to mount disc, and it kinda just did nothing....said system error.....so i force quit the disc utility......

someone else said to partition it, not erase it, to choose to do one large partition.

now when i connect the external drive to mac, it says
not readable....initialize, ignore, eject (i have these 3 options)

have i messed up the external drive??
 
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