can't find ethernet external hard drive

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hello. I just got the new macbook pro 15" yesterday, and i'm trying to retrieve my music from my external hard drive (which used to be connected to my windows machine) to put on here. i don't know where to find the external hard drive which is connected to the lap top via an ethernet cable. do i actually have to install the hard drive's software for the lap top to recognize it? or am i simply not looking in the right place? thanks

by the way, it's a maxtor 320 gig (not sure of the model). i don't think i have the box anymore, so i can't find the install cd and the usb cable, i only have an ethernet cable
 

cwa107


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Your Mac's Specs
14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Most external hard drives connect via either USB or Firewire. Are you certain its attached via an Ethernet cable? If so, that would make it a NAS drive, and more extensive configuration would be necessary.
 
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Duck_Stab
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ok, so i'm going to get a usb to usb cable to connect it instead of the ethernet cable. but will the macbook pro be able to recognize it even though it was used for a windows computer? sorry if this seems redundant, but i don't know how i would find anything that i've connected to the computer. what is the equivalent of the Computer menu on a windows machine (where you can access your hard drive, external hard drives, cameras, etc) on a mac? thanks.
 

cwa107


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Your Mac's Specs
14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Generally, external devices that provide storage are mounted right to the desktop, much like your Macintosh HD shows there.

If the external drive is formatted in NTFS, you will be able to read to it, but not write to it. If you need full Read/Write support, you'll need a third party utility like MacFUSE or Paragon NTFS for Mac. Alternatively, you can format it in FAT32 (on the Mac, since Windows imposes an artificial 32GB limitation on FAT32 partition sizes) which is universally compatible.
 

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