Converting pc internal hard drives to Imac extneral hard drives

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MAC hardware gurus:

I ordering an IMAC 20" tomorrow. my current pc has new hardrives a 160g & 80g. I can buy and external hard drive case for apple, and use these drives as externals.

How easy is this going to be?

It it possible to slave one drive as a windows drive and the second as back up and video editing work space?

please advise of any pit falls

kjr _Switcher
 
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2GHz Mac Mini 2GB RAM 160GB 10.6.2 | MDD DP 1.25GHz G4 1.5GB RAM 10.4.11 | 233MHz iMac G3 10.3.9
kforum said:
MAC hardware gurus:

I ordering an IMAC 20" tomorrow. my current pc has new hardrives a 160g & 80g. I can buy and external hard drive case for apple, and use these drives as externals.

How easy is this going to be?

It it possible to slave one drive as a windows drive and the second as back up and video editing work space?

please advise of any pit falls

kjr _Switcher

I don't know of any Apple external cases, you can buy a third party one with FW or hard drive connectors. Any external through a FW port can be used, holding Option(I think) while booting with BootCamp should allow you to use it as the Windows drive. Wish I had an Intel with it to know for sure. I know you can definitely use an external as a backup - most laptop owners do just that.
 
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I'd recommend USB 2. Not because I like it better, but because your iMac will have more USB 2 ports that FireWire ports.

One other thing, since your pulling them from a Windows box, the Mac can read and write to FAT32 drives, but can only read (not write to) NTFS drives. You may need to format the drives as FAT32, assuming they are not already. I'd recommend using the Mac to do so, as it is easier to format them as FAT32 with OSX.
 

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