01-17-2010, 05:00 PM

Before reading the rest please understand i am at time slightly challenged when it come to all things computers and this is probably basic to a lot of you

Hello Ive just bought a Macbook pro and want to transfer all my music and photo files from my PC straight to the Mac.

I thought i would do this be external hard drive as it would then give me the hard drive to use as a back up.

I've been on amazon and some of the reviews say the drives are not for Macs which has now confused me as i thought they would all be compatible and now i read something about FAT32 or NFTS.

can someone kindly clear this up for for and point me in the way of a 500gb HD which will do the job nice and easy for me.

Thanks in advance and hello again.

01-17-2010, 05:30 PM

Macs can read and write to FAT32

Macs can read only from NTFS, they can write to NTFS with third party software

So you can copy files from the PC and copy them off to the mac with no software needed. You dont need any extra drivers to get the drive to appear in OS X and copy off the drive.

If you need to read and write an NTFS drive there is free software available.

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01-17-2010, 05:51 PM

I'm hoping someone can help me on a similar issue. Just bought my MacBook yesterday, and hooked up my ext. HDD (NTFS) via USB. I was hoping I could have read access to the drive in order to copy music & pics to the Mac.

When I power up the drive & connect the USB cable I get the following message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer", and three options: Initialize, Ignore, and Eject. Under initialize I've tried both Verify Disk & Repair Disk, but no joy. Any ideas?

Thanks for helping a n00b

01-17-2010, 07:56 PM

Originally Posted by fridayxiii

I'm hoping someone can help me on a similar issue. Just bought my MacBook yesterday, and hooked up my ext. HDD (NTFS) via USB. I was hoping I could have read access to the drive in order to copy music & pics to the Mac.

When I power up the drive & connect the USB cable I get the following message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer", and three options: Initialize, Ignore, and Eject. Under initialize I've tried both Verify Disk & Repair Disk, but no joy. Any ideas?

Thanks for helping a n00b

Will this Cable help?