External Hard Drive

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Amy3125


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I have a couple old PCs that I want to get my music and pictures off of so I can get rid of them. I have an external hard drive that I've honestly never used just b/c I never got around to it. I want to put the files on that and then run them through my MacBook. I've had the mac for a little over a year, but I haven't really tried to do anything pc-to-mac related like this. I know it's probably a stupid question, but how difficult is it going to be to do this? I've read some things that say it will be no problem, but then I've read some that make it seem like it will be extremely difficult.

Any suggestions?
 
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Amy3125 said:
I have a couple old PCs that I want to get my music and pictures off of so I can get rid of them. I have an external hard drive that I've honestly never used just b/c I never got around to it. I want to put the files on that and then run them through my MacBook. I've had the mac for a little over a year, but I haven't really tried to do anything pc-to-mac related like this. I know it's probably a stupid question, but how difficult is it going to be to do this? I've read some things that say it will be no problem, but then I've read some that make it seem like it will be extremely difficult.

Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Format the external HD to FAT32 and you will have no problems reading or writing to the drive with either Mac or PC.

You can format it as NTFS if you wish, but then things get a little (not a lot) more complicated. With NTFS format on your external HD you will be able to read/write from PCs but read only from your Mac unless you get 3rd party software.

In any case, for what you want to do, no real problems. Format your drive, drag your files from your PCs and then drag them onto your Mac.
Easy-peasy. :)
 
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Well, what I would like to do is just have the files on the external hard drive and access them with OUT transferring them to my macbook hard drive. I would also like to put a lot of the files from my macbook (mostly music and movies) on the external to free up some space.

Is that hard?

Thanks for the advice so far!
 
RavingMac

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Amy3125 said:
Well, what I would like to do is just have the files on the external hard drive and access them with OUT transferring them to my macbook hard drive. I would also like to put a lot of the files from my macbook (mostly music and movies) on the external to free up some space.

Is that hard?

Thanks for the advice so far!
Click to expand...

Not hard.
If the drive is formatted FAT32 you can just use it, though better would be to copy the files to your Mac, format the external drive with Disk Utility to Mac OS Extended Journaled, then copy the files back from your Mac.
 

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