My switching to Mac hinges almost entirely upon one thing.

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Jon-o

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I have an external harddrive for my PC, and I have around 2000 songs plus some word docs for school on there. I know back in the day if you took a PC floppy disk and put it in a Mac you'd have to format it first and then lose all your data before it would work. Will I have to format my external harddrive for it to be useable on the Mac or what? I don't want to have to rip all my cds onto the Mac again...
 
rman

rman


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Not true. From day one Apple computers were able to read PC floppies and hard disks. You should be able to read/write the disk, but writing to the disk might be a problem.
 
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Jon-o

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Cool, thanks. :) Maybe I'm getting mixed up and it's actually that PC's can't read disks that are formatted for Macs.
 
Ragle

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I had this same concern when I switched to Mac last week from a PC. If the drive is formatted as NTFS, then the Mac will only be able to read from it, not write. If it is formatted FAT32, then both read and write are possible. I am still working on getting an enclosure for my drive to be able to use it as external. Once I do, I will most likely copy everything over to the Mac and re-format it to Mac's standard.
 
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jaetique

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Ragle said:
I had this same concern when I switched to Mac last week from a PC. If the drive is formatted as NTFS, then the Mac will only be able to read from it, not write. If it is formatted FAT32, then both read and write are possible. I am still working on getting an enclosure for my drive to be able to use it as external. Once I do, I will most likely copy everything over to the Mac and re-format it to Mac's standard.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip, Ragle. I'm considering purchasing extra HDD space. I'm not sure yet though. I thought about getting a 40GB iPod for music and storage space. I don't listen to music that much though. Hmm.
 

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