10-29-2011, 03:30 PM

Hey guys,
I have our old PC that died on us. It has all of my iTunes music (all from my cd collection that i no longer have), and all of our family pictures on it. I am somewhat confident that the hard drive is ok and I'm going to buy an external enclosure.
My question: can I just hook it up to my mac (Lion) by using the USB port?
How do I get them on the Mac? is it a copy function? download function?

I thought I saw some kind of like import assistant on the Mac.........true?

Anyways, I'd appreciate any help.
The enclosures are pretty cheap, so I've got nothing to loose. I can even hook it up to a friends PC, pull the stuff off the drive and somehow get it to the Mac....... But then again, I'm clueless and prob wouldn't even be able to figure that out ahhahahahahahhaha..

10-29-2011, 03:43 PM

It depends on which format the drive is using. If it's FAT-32 you can immediately read and write from it with your Mac. However, if the drive is formatted as NTFS you'll need a third party driver or software in order to write to the drive. Your Mac can read from but not write to NTFS.

Best driver to purchase, and recommended by most of us, is Paragon NTFS from Paragon software currently selling for $19.95.

10-29-2011, 04:35 PM

Chscag is correct, but if all you want to do is pull stuff off the old drive, just connect to the USB port, wait for it to mount and then copy (it's just a Finder function) all your stuff over to wherever you want it. Once you have all off that old drive that you want, you can reformat it with Disk Utility and use it as an external drive just fine.

HINT: Don't copy to the desktop of your Mac, as that will slow it down tremendously. I'd suggest a folder in your Documents folder named to show that it came from the old machine.

10-29-2011, 05:48 PM

AWESOMENESS
I'm so stoked I can just bring everything over.

And Jakerich, That was my next question. thank you very much.

02-03-2012, 05:42 PM

Hi all, I am new to this forum.

I have a similar query.

I have a seagate ext hard drive which Ive been using with my pc laptop. Formatted in ntfs. The hard drive has all my itunes / photos etc.

I just purchased my mac book. Os x 10.6.8

Iam going to purchase a buffalo ministation ext hard drive for the macbook & Paragon ntfs for mac os 9.0.

Is it as simple as I copy the content from seagate ext hard drive to the buffalo ministation on the pc laptop.

Then install paragon software on mac, so that when I connect the buffalo ministation with all my itunes on etc, the mac boook will be able to read the content and write to the hard drive as well.

Surely life isnt this simple???

all help and advice gladley received and please diliver in very simple idiots guide instructions.

Thanks in advance

Jon

02-04-2012, 04:13 AM

Originally Posted by MacRookPro

It has all of my iTunes music (all from my cd collection that i no longer have)

I don't mean to be the old sourpuss that rains on the parade, but I have to point out that this is illegal. By US copyright law, you are obligated to delete the songs you ripped from CD when you gave away, sold or otherwise permanently parted with the media for which you had a license. The forum mods are sticklers about US law here, and I thought you should know for future reference (and for the info of other readers of this thread).

Having said that, PRAISE and HALLELUJAH BROTHER! SALVATION IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER!!

So you don't have the discs anymore and just found out your song files are contraband, eh? Well I'm here to spread the good news -- you can get legal for silly cheap money! Are you ready? Here it is!

ITunes Match. One year, $25. It will match (probably nearly) all your music and you can even REPLACE the lower-quality rips with 256kbps AAC ones if you like. Now your songs are legal again. BOOM goes the dynamite!!

Best part: if you download the matched iTunes songs to replace your own rips during that year, and you decide not to renew the next year, no problem. You keep the songs you downloaded. Wow, right? How cool is that? 100 percent legal and legit!

Personally I think this is the deal of the century (and the century's only 12 years old!)

02-04-2012, 09:39 PM

Originally Posted by jakerich

Once you have all off that old drive that you want, you can reformat it with Disk Utility and use it as an external drive just fine.

Exactly what I was going to say, and I'd just add another little point:

If you don't expect to be using this drive with Windows and will want to use it for Time Machine back-ups, format it to HFS+; however, if you think you might still need to access it on Windows machines from time to time, format it to exFAT (the "extended", 64-bit version of the FAT32 format used on thumb drives; unlike FAT32 it doesn't limit the maximum size of any single file to 4GB), it'll then work with XP SP3, Vista, and 7...