I have a WD external hard drive formatted for windows. It has all my business's excel,word and other data files on it together with my entire music collection, over 1000 albums. I access it currently via a windows 7 PC but will be changing to a Mac in the next month or so and wonder if I can just plug the hard drive into a spare USB port on the Mac. Re-ripping the music is a time consuming chore that I don't want so any help would be great.
Windows External hard drive access
- Thread starter Davidll
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Hi davidll,
It depends on what you want to do on your hard drive. Just plugging in your hard drive to your Mac will be in "read-only" mode, which means you cannot delete, move, create, edit, or copy files in your hard drive, but you can view your files. You will have to format and change the system to something a Mac can "write" to the hard drive.
There is software available online that can make your Mac read Windows hard drives. WD does not seem to have a driver available, but check the website to see if I am wrong. Googling "NTFS for Mac" can help find software as well.
It depends on what you want to do on your hard drive. Just plugging in your hard drive to your Mac will be in "read-only" mode, which means you cannot delete, move, create, edit, or copy files in your hard drive, but you can view your files. You will have to format and change the system to something a Mac can "write" to the hard drive.
There is software available online that can make your Mac read Windows hard drives. WD does not seem to have a driver available, but check the website to see if I am wrong. Googling "NTFS for Mac" can help find software as well.
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Hi davidll,
It depends on what you want to do on your hard drive. Just plugging in your hard drive to your Mac will be in "read-only" mode, which means you cannot delete, move, create, edit, or copy files in your hard drive, but you can view your files. You will have to format and change the system to something a Mac can "write" to the hard drive.
There is software available online that can make your Mac read Windows hard drives. WD does not seem to have a driver available, but check the website to see if I am wrong. Googling "NTFS for Mac" can help find software as well.
i bounce back and forth between W7 and my mid 2012 MBP
i give a +1 vote on NTFS for Mac
its fantastic and worth every penny
you will be able to completely use any windows formatted (NTFS) drive to read and save
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As far as the music files go what format are they in? iTunes can read files from several different formats so there may be no need for re-ripping the music.
If you don't want to move the files to a Mac formatted drive then the Paragon NTFS driver for Mac is well worth the money.
If you don't want to move the files to a Mac formatted drive then the Paragon NTFS driver for Mac is well worth the money.
The music files are all mp3's and the hard drive is where my iTunes libray goes to get the music I play I'll probably copy everything over to the mac's hard drive and the reformat the external one and copy the files back to the external drive as I would prefer not have the music taking up valuable disk space on the Mac.
Thanks for the help.
Davidll
Thanks for the help.
Davidll
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