I had been using an old eMachine with Windows Vista since 2007, which I was backing up to a My Book Essential, and waiting for the eMachine to **bleep** out before I replaced it. The motherboard finally went on it the other day, and I replaced it with a Macbook Pro, running Yosemite.
The Macbook recognizes that the drive was formatted for Windows, and only gives me the option of reformatting for Mac. Is there a conversion software of some sort that will allow me to simply pull the files from the My Book? It seems to defeat the purpose of having a backup external drive if I can’t, right?
You should be able to read from a windows patitioned drive on a mac the only thing that would not be possible to do is write to it, I would recommend to copy your data to the mac and then reformatting the unit on the mac so you can both read and write to the drive.
That’s part of the problem, actually. I unlock the My Book, and don’t see any of the files that I have backed up. All I see are users guides and Smartware installation files. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that nothing was ever saved to the My Book, but I would periodically run a manual back up, in addition to the dynamic one, just to avoid such a thing.
