Soon th be Switcher Question.

Hi All,

This is my first post on this site and so far by the looks of the helpful Sticky's and informative links I think I will enjoy my stay and make my transition over to a Mac more enjoyable. I will be soon purchasing a Macbook which will be my official switch to Mac, I wont be switching however until OSX 10.5 (Leopard) is officially released and available with the Macbook.

I currently have a 320GB HD that I would like to use as an external drive for the Macbook. I have about 100GB of that which is important to me (video's, music, documents). Now my question to all you Mac veterans how do I go about making the drive compatible with the Mac without losing all my important data, I realise I must format the HD to the Mac's file system. Is there a better way then backing up all Data on DVD then transfering back once the drive is formatted with the Mac?

Any suggestions would help in deciding how I will eventually migrate my important data to be used with the Mac.

Thanks

Well, OSX can read from ntfs even if it cant write to it... so for just accessing the data you are fine. you prob want to manipulate it too... I guess you can copy as much as you can to your mac, then format the HD then copy it back...

Thanks for the reply, I just thought of something however. I have a 160GB drive lying around, I can format that to the Mac and then just copy all the data from the 320gb to the 160gb! format the 320 and then write back to it from the 160gb just hope OSX can read Vistas NTFS? is WinXP and Vistas NTFS the same?

I would be surprised if Leopard would not be able to read Vista's NTFS if it is different from XP's. I don't know if they are different, though.

Paragon does have a Beta 3 program out that will let you read and write to NTFS partitions. If you plan on sharing any of the data with Windows machines or Windows partitions, you may want to look into that option.

In the MS world, NTFS is NTFS - there is no difference. I would seriously look into Paragon's beta, as that would just save you tons of time & effort. But is your HD formatted as NTFS or FAT32? If it's Fat32, you have no issues - OS-X will read that as is.

They are deffinetly NTFS, only reason I asked about the XP/Vistas NTFS being different was that I had linux installed at one stage and it had problems reading from the old Vista drive.

Anyway I will check out paragon, I dont think I will be swapping info with the Vista PC as that will be going to the parents to use

Cheers