Some difficulty transferring files

Hi,

I have recently purchased a brand new MACBOOK PRO and I am having some serious issues with getting my files across from my old PC (Running XP). I borrowed a 250 Gigabyte external hard disk from work. The hard disk brand is "WiseD for Mac & PC". Anyway, I tediously copied all of my files over to the hard disk (as my old PC only had USB 1.2 - groooaaan!). This data is a total of about 110 gigabytes, comprised of Word docs, photographs, InDesign files, PDFs, videos, and music. When I connect the hard disk to my sister's laptop (running Vista) I can access, open, and read all of the folders and files. But when I connect it to my Mac, not even half of the folders show up, and even then sometimes only about half of the information contained within them shows up as well. The files are not marked "hidden" and I find it strange that they all show up on the PC, but not on the MAC. Any help greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Maconfusion

This is alien. Do you think you could post screenshots of the drive's contents as viewed from a Mac and from a PC? Maybe we could determine from the pattern of missing files a reason.

Also, what's filesystem on the HDD? (It might be an NTFS thing)

Just a shot in the dark on this one, but I would be inclined, from the Windows side, to do the equivalent of chkdsk, to see if there are any logical structure errors on the disk. Perhaps Vista is working around them, but Mac is not.

I also find myself wondering about file permissions, and whether some of the files on the PC are under different user accounts. Can you see any pattern in the files that do show up on the Mac and those that don't?

Are you "Linux friendly"? Perhaps booting up a Live Linux CD such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu would be informative. It would be able to see everything and anything on the disk if accessed from the root account. Is it possible to try this?

Finally, what file system is the external hard drive? FAT32? NTFS? HFS+?

Screengrabs and other details

Hi guys

Thanks for helping me with this. I went and got the details of the hard disk in Mac and it says that it is "Windows NT File System"...I presume this is NTFS, as you mentioned might have been the problem. I've included a screengrab of the details.

I accessed the folder in both MAC and PC. The files were all transported across from my older user account on my XP machine ("Jason"), even though there were two users. But all of these files are definitely only from my user account.

When I open it in MAC, I get "$recycle.bin", "Jason's stuff", "QSA stuff" (work folder), "Recycler", "System volume information", "Toms" (a friend's folders, added after I did my initial file transfer).

Opened in Vista, as you can see, there are A LOT more folders.

I hope this helps. Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated!!

Maconfusion

if u have the chance i think u sholud format the ex.hd on ur mac and then transfer files again to it from ur pc..of course with a simple lan cable u can transfer them right to ur mac without any problems..i've done both.worked greatly for me..

Check out this thread, just posted a couple of days ago.
A public beta for a program that allows read & write to NTFS from OS X.

Have only tried a couple of things with it so far myself that typically you can't do within OS X. My Bootcamp XP partition is set up as NTFS.
From within Finder, I can:
1) Move files around on the XP partition.
2) Delete files and folders
3) Move files from NTFS partition to my external HFS+ drive
4) Move files from MacHD to the NTFS partition

This may help get you over the hurdle without re-formatting to FAT32 and re-transferring all those files.

The program has an auto installer - restarts the system and so far has just worked in allowing me pretty much full access to my NTFS partition within the Finder window.

And from the pic's you've shown us - Vista is only showing 3 items on the drive - Jason's stuff, QSA stuff and toms
Finder is showing you those same 3 folders
The other Vista pic you've shown is is what you're seeing inside the Jason's stuff folder.
What do you see when you open the Jason's stuff folder in Finder?

Detto Technologies has a program called Mov2Mac. I used it when I made the switch to my Santa Rosa MBP. It moved designated files to the Mac very quickly. This included documents, pictures and whatever else I wanted. Google the name and give it a try. It costs around fifty bucks.

On the HD, you might need to reformat it with OS X. Do this through Disk Utilities. (As I recall, I had to make a call to customer support to assist.) My MBP couldn't read it until I did this. Now, with Airport Extreme, backing up is a simple drag and drop. Really easy.

Yep, as bobtomay mentioned, there really are just three folders in the root of the external HD. '$RECYCLE.BIN' is a hidden system folder in Windows, and 'RECYCLER' and 'System Volume Information' don't show either. They do, however, on the Mac.

Now if all contents of in 'F:/Jason's stuff' appear in the Mac and on Windows (including a few system extras), you're fine. In Windows, too, some files hidden in Macs ('.dstore') might appear. These can be discounted.

Else, because your external drive runs the NTFS filesystem, you might encounter problems. In which case, jrichard102 and bobtomay's advice will come in real handy.

If all else fails, format your external drive in FAT32; your Mac will love that.