External Hard Drive

Onecoolcookie

Ok not sure where to post this but I'll give here a shot, basically I got a new mac a while back so backed everything up from my old windows laptop onto an external hard drive. But I can't copy files from my mac to the external hard drive now so I'm guessing it's something to do with formatting. Any way around this?

mathepac

Sorry I got part this so wrong it defies belief.

What OS is your Mac running?

Onecoolcookie

It's a 2011 MBP running Lion

mathepac

I assume you know about the Windows Migration Assistant for Lion http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1415.

This utility from Apple lets you do the opposite to waht you want i.e. suck Windows data onto a Mac.

Have you looked at Bootcamp or at mounting your Windows internal drive on the Mac via the network.

Onecoolcookie

Thanks for the reply, not really interested in Bootcamp to be honest as I wouldn't get the use out of it to make it worthwhile. The second option sounds interesting though, how would I go about doing that?

mathepac

http://www.google.ie/search?q=build+a+network+mac+lion+and+windows&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Here's a bunch of papers and how-to documents. Anything useful or close?

Stainless_Steel

Alternatively you can reformat your external HD to FAT32 format. Then backup your windows files again and then you can transfer onto the mac.

The issue you are having is due to the external drive having a format of NTFS which is windows file system.

LukeS_

Sorry to bump in,but I've got an NTFS external HDD, will I be able to partition a FAT32 partition on the HDD while keeping the NTFS partition or will I need a whole reformat of thhe drive to make a partition? I have a 2TB drive and I'd like to keep a back up of everything on my mac, on the drive.

Deep Thought

Hi

Not sure if this is what you need, but I use Paragon NFTS to access my Ext HDD

This allows me to read / write to the drive

DT

Stainless_Steel

You can have 2 partitions but you'll have to delete your existing one to achieve it.

LukeS_

Stainless_Steel wrote: »

You can have 2 partitions but you'll have to delete your existing one to achieve it.

That's what I was thinking. So that's my dilemma, I don't have enough space on my Win machine to move the stuff off the ext. drive onto it. I might give that Paragon NTFS thing a go. How come bootcamp doesn't need you to reformat the whole drive when creating a Windows partition on the Mactintosh HD drive?

gavobrien

I think another poster mentioned it, but here's an article about a utility that will let you read & write NTFS formatted drives: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26288/ntfs-for-mac-os-x

I'm using it myself and it works a treat. No need for partitions & reformatting.

Edit:
DeepThought mentioned it above -

Hi

Not sure if this is what you need, but I use Paragon NFTS to access my Ext HDD

This allows me to read / write to the drive

DT