newbie Q re: transfering files

Before my pc died I backed my files up onto a seagate freeagent external hard drive. Some months later my macbook is pretty full and I need to move some files onto my hard drive but - of course - I can't write to the drive because it's ntfs.

I need to reformat the drive but don't want to lose the data. I don't have enough space on my mac to store everything while I reformat. I have another PC I could use for storage though.

So... I figure I copy stuff from the portable hard drive onto my PC. I then reformat the hard drive to hfs+. But then I won't be able to move the files back to the portable hard drive, right?

My quuestion, assuming everything makes sense so far, is whether I should:
a) use some fancy means of copying files to the hard drive
b) copy files from the pc to my mac (how?)
c) burn many dvds


Any help appreciated.

My recommendation - setup a share on you PC, dump the contents of your external on your PC (put in share folder), format the HD, put stuff on Mac on HD, copy stuff from Windows share on to your external (through OS X).

That may be more complicated that it needs to be.

I was in exactly the same position until someone here recommended a fantastic little programme which allows OS X to Read and Write to NTFS drives.

I'm at work at the mo so can't get the name but I'm sure someone here will let us know. It's by far the easiest solution to your issue.

PearlJamFan said:

I was in exactly the same position until someone here recommended a fantastic little programme which allows OS X to Read and Write to NTFS drives.

I'm at work at the mo so can't get the name but I'm sure someone here will let us know. It's by far the easiest solution to your issue.

Click to expand...

Ah! Googled it, found NTFS-3G and am away! My faith in macs restored.

Paragon's NTFS for Mac