PC to MAcBook Pro

paulmac · Dec 22, 2010

Hi, ive just signed up as im expecting to take delivery of my new MacBook Pro tomorrow or friday. The one i went for was the 17" macbook pro, 2.8ghz intel core duo, 4g ram with 500g hard drive. Now this is my 1st macbook and i have a few questions about the big swap over. I keep all my pictures and my music on a WD external hard drive, will i have any problems copying all my music & pictures to the macbook off this hard drive? and also i will be using it to run traktor scratch pro for dj'ing. Is it a simple task to copy them over? how do i do it? would i just drag & drop the folders off the external hard drive onto the mac desktop? is there such a thing on a mac like my pictures and my music? sorry for the total newb questions i just wanna be sure i know how to do it when i get it, thanks in advance for any help and advice

s2odin · Dec 22, 2010

paulmac said:
Hi, ive just signed up as im expecting to take delivery of my new MacBook Pro tomorrow or friday. The one i went for was the 17" macbook pro, 2.8ghz intel core duo, 4g ram with 500g hard drive. Now this is my 1st macbook and i have a few questions about the big swap over. I keep all my pictures and my music on a WD external hard drive, will i have any problems copying all my music & pictures to the macbook off this hard drive? and also i will be using it to run traktor scratch pro for dj'ing. Is it a simple task to copy them over? how do i do it? would i just drag & drop the folders off the external hard drive onto the mac desktop? is there such a thing on a mac like my pictures and my music? sorry for the total newb questions i just wanna be sure i know how to do it when i get it, thanks in advance for any help and advice

Yes, just plug your WD into your Mac and drag and drop them off. Yes, there are "pictures" and "music" on the Mac, just make sure you put the pictures in pictures and music in music. If you want to use your new hard drive with your Mac, you will probably have to reformat it in order to write to it tho, just fyi. Your Mac can read it right away, but in order to write to it you need special software or a reformat.

As far as your software goes, it depends on the software. Look on the box or CD and see if it has a Mac logo. If not, you can still run it via Bootcamp.

paulmac · Dec 22, 2010

Hi thanks for the quick reply, so would i be best to transfer everything off the WD to my mac, cos will reformatting it like wipe it clean of everything on it?? also how do i reformat the WD?

s2odin · Dec 22, 2010

paulmac said:
Hi thanks for the quick reply, so would i be best to transfer everything off the WD to my mac, cos will reformatting it like wipe it clean of everything on it?? also how do i reformat the WD?

Well if the HD is formatted FAT 32 you won't need to reformat. If it is NTFS, then yes you will need to reformat.

And in order to reformat, you will use Disk Utility (included on the Mac)

MYmacROX · Dec 22, 2010

Welcome!

Yes, copy over everything you want first. Reformatting will erase the external.
To reformat it, open Disk Utility. You can find it by opening Finder (Mac's version of Windows Explorer), go to your Applications Folder, then open the Utilities Folder and D.U. is in there. Open it, click on your external drive on the left side to select it and click on the ERASE tab. If you plan to use Time Machine to backup your Mac (recommended), then format the external as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). That's about it.

Here's a screen shot of what Disk Utility looks like. This particular one is for partitioning your drive, but you get an idea of where everything is in there.

paulmac · Dec 22, 2010

Hi yes, i plan to use timemachine to back it up as it seems an easy task to do and a very good way to do it. I was thinkin of investing in the time capsule to do this so its a painless exercise as i believe it just does it automatically for you every hour, is this true, and are they worth buying? ive just been reading a few posts about them and i believe i can actually store my music etc on there aswell as backing up to it, and be able to access it easily when i want

MYmacROX · Dec 22, 2010

paulmac said:
Hi yes, i plan to use timemachine to back it up as it seems an easy task to do and a very good way to do it. I was thinkin of investing in the time capsule to do this so its a painless exercise as i believe it just does it automatically for you every hour, is this true, and are they worth buying? ive just been reading a few posts about them and i believe i can actually store my music etc on there aswell as backing up to it, and be able to access it easily when i want

TC has its advantages, but I just use a Western Digital external drive. You can use any external HDD you want. Time Machine (the app on your Mac) is what determines the hourly backups (or daily or whatever time increment). It doesn't have anything to do with the Time Capsule. So you can plug in a WD or LaCie or any other brand HDD and tell Time Machine to backup hourly and sit there and do whatever you want with it running in the background. ...NOT hogging valuable computing resources, might I add. ;D

So up to you if you want to invest in the TC. Do some research and see if it's a match for you. I'm not really suggesting for or against it.

paulmac · Dec 23, 2010

i like the idea of it being wireless, as i get fed up of plugging my external hdd in now, thats why im putting all my music on the macbook and why i went for the 500gb hdd so i dont have to plug the Wd hdd in when i use traktor for dj'ing

Slydude · Dec 23, 2010

Some other routers allow you to attach hard drives to them so they should also work for wireless backup (no guarantees) though the Time Capsules are remarkably easy to set up.

Wireless backups are really convenient. You may want to perform the first backup by wire though. The first backup generally has quite a bit of data to backup and can take a while. Subsequent backups are much faster.

PC to MAcBook Pro

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