From PC to Mac with an external HD

Joined
Feb 27, 2007
Messages
4
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Location
Brooklyn, NY
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Pro;2.66 Quad Xeon-2gb ram-250&500gb hd, 15" MB Pro; 2.33GHz 2 Duo-2gb ram
Earlier this month I purchased a Firewire, 2bay, external HD system to store my image files. (I'm a photographer). A few weeks ago I decided to move to MAC and purchased a Mac Pro system. The two drives in my external bay are formatted NTFS, with one (A) containing data. What I'd like to do is reformat the drives with HFS+ / with about 50gigs partitioned and formated as Fat32. This way I can move some files over to that partition and use my PC if I need to, (only because I have 1 or 2 programs on the PC that don't come in MAC format. Can you guys tell me if my plan below holds water and help me get there?

1.While the external drives are still attached to the PC, reformat drive (B) to Fat32, then move all data from drive A to drive B. Then I can reformat drive (A) to Fat32.

2.Attach the external drives to the Mac Pro, and reformat drive (A) to HFS+ with 50gigs partitioned and formatted to Fat32. Move the data from drive B to drive (A), then reformat drive B like drive A

I hope some of you can help me and I didn't confuse anyone. If there's anything I'm missing please feel free to tell this MAC newbie. I'm not sure if I can use the MAC to see the NTFS drives and reformat them, this would cut out most if not all of step 1.

HELP!!!!
 
Joined
Feb 13, 2007
Messages
254
Reaction score
8
Points
18
Location
Worthing, West Sussex, UK
Your Mac's Specs
27" Retina 5K iMac 3.2Ghz Quad 24GB RAM, 1TB HD. iPhone 11.
Personally speaking I wouldnt bother with all of that. Instead I'd just format the disc as HFS+ and then get yourself a copy of MacOpener for your PC, at least that's what I do anyway. This program will mount and HFS+ partition and allow you to read and write to it.

At $49.99 http://www.dataviz.com/purchase/buy/macopener/mo_order_pg1.html it's not going to break the bank either.

There is a more 'comprehensive' program avaliable from the same place called Conversion Plus that also converts files to their Mac equivalent for $69.99 but I don't think you would really need that.

HTH
 
Joined
Apr 29, 2006
Messages
4,576
Reaction score
378
Points
83
Location
St. Somewhere
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Studio, M1 Max, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD
Joined
Dec 3, 2006
Messages
9,383
Reaction score
417
Points
83
Location
Irvine, CA
Your Mac's Specs
Black Macbook C2D 2GHz 3GB RAM 250GB HD iPhone 4 iPad 3G
If individual files aren't any larger than 4GB each, then why don't you just format the entire drive as FAT32? Would save you the trouble of buying software and having duplicate files on your drives.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top