[njphoto]

Hi,
This is my first time posting here and I'm not sure this is the right area or if this question has been covered 100 times, so I'll apologize in advance. I have an external hard drive attached to a PC and I want to connect it to a Mac. What's the process for doing this? The hard drive has about 75GB of photos on it and I don't know if I have a place where I can dump them if I need to reformat the drive to FAT32. Any help will be much appreciated, thanks.

[compnovo]

njphoto, on 16 December 2009 - 09:13 AM, said:

Hi,
This is my first time posting here and I'm not sure this is the right area or if this question has been covered 100 times, so I'll apologize in advance. I have an external hard drive attached to a PC and I want to connect it to a Mac. What's the process for doing this? The hard drive has about 75GB of photos on it and I don't know if I have a place where I can dump them if I need to reformat the drive to FAT32. Any help will be much appreciated, thanks.

I'm a real noob with Macs, but I don't believe you have to do anything special with your external hard drive because Macs can read NTFS files (which I'm assuming yours is), they just can't write to it or alter files without special software. That's why FAT32 is ideal if you're sharing a drive between Mac and Windows (like we do at my house): both OSs have read/write capability.

This post has been edited by compnovo: 16 December 2009 - 11:28 AM

[njphoto]

I'd like to be able to continue adding photos to the drive once it's connected to the Mac.

[compnovo]

njphoto, on 16 December 2009 - 10:57 AM, said:

I'd like to be able to continue adding photos to the drive once it's connected to the Mac.

Then your best bet will probably be to format the drive to FAT32. I would transfer the photos to the PC (you'll lose them otherwise). Here's a link for doing the format from a cmd prompt: http://www.online-te...rive-to-fat-32/

[njphoto]

OK thanks.

[smax013]

njphoto, on 16 December 2009 - 09:13 AM, said:

Hi,
This is my first time posting here and I'm not sure this is the right area or if this question has been covered 100 times, so I'll apologize in advance. I have an external hard drive attached to a PC and I want to connect it to a Mac. What's the process for doing this? The hard drive has about 75GB of photos on it and I don't know if I have a place where I can dump them if I need to reformat the drive to FAT32. Any help will be much appreciated, thanks.

As noted by the other poster, a Mac will read an NTFS volume, but cannot write to it without some third party software (such as NTFS-3G or Paragon NTFS). The exception seems to be Snow Leopard (aka Mac OS 10.6). Apple was supposedly going to include full NTFS support, but apparently did not fully "activate" it. You can supposedly "turn it on" with this: http://forums.macrum...ad.php?t=785376

It is highly likely, however, that you drive is already formatted as a FAT32 drive, which the Mac OS can read and write to. If you bought the drive and just started using it without reformatting it, then it is rather likely that it is formatted as a FAT32 drive as that is what most external drives will come formatted as. Thus, I would suggest that you just plug in the drive to the Mac and try to use it. No matter what, the drive should mount on the Mac and you should be able to read the files from it. If you cannot write new files to it, then that would mean it is formatted as an NTFS volume. If you can write to it, then it should be FAT32 already.

And just so you know, the proper way to disconnect an external drive on a Mac is either to completely shutdown the Mac before disconnecting it (also a proper way to it for a Windows computer as well) OR properly unmount the drive first by dragging its desktop icon to the Trash Can icon (which will turn into an Eject icon) in the Dock after which you can then disconnect the drive after a few seconds (i.e. the drive icon should be gone from the desktop).

[asiafish]

You can add support for NTFS to OS X, either through enabling the feature in the OS directly as previously described or through third party utilities. Other possibilities exist too. If you use Parallels or Fusion and only need occasional access to write on NTFS volumes you don't have to do anything more than launch Parallels and use your Windows VM for your file operations.

SInce I am about 85% Mac these days, I format my external drives using Mac OS HFS+ file format and bought a copy of MediaFour's MacDrive 8, gives lets Windows access Mac volumes with full read/write access. I own two licenses, one on my Boot Camp Windows 7 installation and the other on my Windows server. If I used more PCs than Macs I would do it the other way.