transferring files from laptop hard drive to pc

My macbook pro with leapard died. The logic board needs to be replaced. For now, I wan to remove my hard drive from the mac book pro and transfer some files to my PC.

What type of enclosure do I need to do this?
What else do I need to do?

can I transfer .rtf files from the mac text editor?
can I transfer entire folders?

What else do I need to know?

my macbook pro died. i tried connecting the hard drive with time machine on it to a windows XP pc. The driver got recognized, but when I go to the windows browser I don't even see the drive.

anyway I can get windows atleast recognize the hard drive? The hardware was found and windows shows that it is connected.

You need to install a program that will let Windows Read HFS formatted drives.

This should do the trick: MacDrive Mediafour

Its a paid for app but you get a trial period which should let you get the things you need off the drive

Reading the files properly is a different issue entirely. Time Machine expects a drive formatted as HFS+ if it was locally connected to your Mac. AFAIK Windows will not read this format without some third party software such as Catacombae - HFSExplorer and MacDrive Mediafour

Any 2.5" SATA Enclosure will work fine and yes you can transfer anything you want off of there provided you have software for Windows to read Apple formatted drives. rtf is pretty much a universal document format so you'll be able to open those without a problem and yes you can transfer entire folders over.

what software do i need to read apple formatted drives?

Something like this

MacDrive Mediafour

I have my time machine hard drive plugged in to my pc as an external drive. hardware found, but when i look in windows explorer i don't see it. I installed hfsexplorer, but I can't give it a path.

not sure what to do. The drive is powered and detected by windows.

I'm fairly certain that in order to read the drive and be able to extract data from it you're going to need a program that can actually mount and write to the drive. As Slydude recommended, you need Mediafour MacDrive.

Have you tried to mount the drive with Disk Manager? (Open Disk Management from Admin tools) You first have to assign it a drive letter. Your Windows drive is C, so you should be able to assign the TM drive a subsequent drive letter. Open the drive properties and assign it a letter from there. That should enable you to at least "see" the drive and its contents. You will still need MacDrive to write and extract data from it though.

Let us know.

@Guessing

Please keep your posts to a single thread. You've already posted most of this information in another thread and received numerous replies. Duplicate and cross posting causes confusion and clutter.

Posts merged.