My Macbook Pro broke, and I never got a chance to back up my files beforehand because whenever I would plug in anything into the USB drive the computer would automatically shut itself down. So now it’s completely broken and won’t turn on, so I backed up my files using someone else’s computer (also a Mac) via FireWire and now I need to download these files onto a PC from My Passport. Clearly, my problem is that the hard drive is already formatted for Mac. From what I’ve gathered so far, in order to format My Passport for both Mac & PC, everything existing on the hard drive before it is formatted for BOTH will be destroyed – i.e., you need to have your files backed up elsewhere until the dual-formatting is complete, or else you’ll lose all your files. Unfortunately, my Passport is the only device that contains everything I need, and furthermore, I really have nowhere else to back these files up.
So my My Passport is presently the only device that contains all of my backed up files; what I need is a way to safely and successfully recover/salvage all of these backed up files, onto my PC, without having to back everything up elsewhere in the meantime, if possible. A route that is direct yet painless. I figure there has to be some roundabout way to do this… in desperate times, something that may require a few extra steps than if I was in the position to go about this the normal/recommended way.
I was thinking, could I somehow use an HFS driver for Windows to achieve this? Like this one from PARAGON Software Group? How exactly would I do this? Obviously I need to be extremely cautious so as not to screw anything up, since this is the only existing copy of my needed computer files.
Any help or advice you can give me will be greatly appreciated, thank you so much in advance.
Since the drive is formatted for Mac there are only 2 choices one is pay software. If you can afford a second drive there is a solution. Formatt the new drive NTFS. Then go to a Mac and download NTFS-3G http://mac-free.com/download/NTFS-3G.html and you should be able to copy the files off the old drive to the new one and use that on Windows.
You mentioned there are two choices but I only read one in your response… and I can’t afford another hard drive, so I’m hoping there is another solution that you forgot to mention that I could work with.
That was the software I was thinking of but it’s not free. I suspect if you look at the trial version there is some limit to the amount of data or file size you can move. I think which ever way you go it’s going to cost you some money for software or another HD. The NTFS-3G I mentioned in the other post is free.
You mean MacDrive is what you were talking about, correct? Well it seems fairly easy that way… I’m considering getting it anyway, but only in the case that it would make the whole process super safeguarded, which does indeed seem to be the case. I’m not all up on this stuff exactly, don’t want to assume any comfortability unless I’m a friggen expert, which I’m not. So I’m just trying to really make sure…
But if I were to get MacDrive, what would be the procedure there then? How will it run on my computer? Just like any other program? Do I just run it and then plug in my hard drive and it’ll automatically start leading me through the steps? Is it pretty self-explanatory or is there anything I should be wary about…
If you don’t know offhand that makes total sense and I perfectly understand. Thank you anyway. Ha
