I just purchased a Mac, and previously had a PC. I was using a My Book Elite on that PC, and would like to transfer that information over to my Mac. I cannot do that as of right now. I know there are certain steps to do this.
Can anyone take me step by step on how to do this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Someone had posted this in a thread I googled back in November:
Go to Disk Utility.
Choose the “Partition”
Under “Options” choose “Master Boot Record”
Under Format " choose “MS-DOS (FAT)”
click “Apply” and “Partition”
The drive is now Formatted with Master Boot Record.
It can be read/write from both Mac and PC computers.
I cannot locate “Disk Utility”. Maybe this is a very stupid question. I apologize in advance!
Ultimately what I’d like to do is to take all the information from my PC, put it on the external drive, and be able to upload it to my Mac. I’m planning on getting rid of the PC so I will not need to read/write on that after this.
I believe the second example only allows you to write on the Mac. Perhaps I’m reading it incorrectly.
formatting FAT32 will work for both Windows and Mac but the down side is 4 gig is the max file size. So if you have videos and huge collections it would be a bit of a problem. You could pm PizzaMatrix and ask him to look at this thread and see if he had any more advice on formatting. I’m not a Mac user, you could also look up in the Mac section.
I would like to inform you that yes, you did read it correctly, NTFS-3G allows you to write to NTFS as it allows your Mac to fully absorb the NTFS file system like it was a part of it, so it is actually helpful and that is the reason it is found in Apple’s main web site =)
“Disk Utility” is tricky to find at times, you need to make sure that all applications are closed on your Mac, that will allow you to see a “Go” button on the top, once you click on “Go” you’ll be able to click on “Utilities” and from there you’ll be able to open Disk Utility.
On the other hand, if you want to transfer files from Windows to Macintosh, since you have a MyBook Elite then you’re good to go since Macs can read NTFS with no issues, this means that if you make a clean copy of your files on Windows (Copy and & paste the files, it has to be done manually) then you’ll be able to drag them out in your Mac without any other configuration needed.
After the files are out, then as you may preffer you can leave the drive as NTFS (If you install NTFS-3 on your Mac), you can format it as FAT32 so all computers can natively write to the drive (But it won’t take files larger than 4GB and won’t do automatic backups) or you can format it as HFS+, which is the native format of current Macs (That is, if you won’t use the drive on Windows again, as the drive will be fully invisible to Windows under this configuration).
If the files are in your external drive, if they were copied directly, then you shoukd be able to see the icon of your drive on the desktop of your Mac and all your files will be inside, ready for you to drag them out with your mouse as your Mac will read them =)
However, if you get a promp that says “Do you want to use -X Drive- to backup with Time Machine”, make sure to select DON’T USE or your Mac will format your drive, killing everything inside! So be careful the first time you connect it!
