mac with old hard drive

[jessie]

i am getting a new mac due to my pc no longer working. i dont want to loose everything on my old hard drive though. so can i buy an empty hard drive case and put my old hard drive in there and just connect it up with a usb cable? will this work? thanks for the help. jessie

 

[LimeiBook86]

i am getting a new mac due to my pc no longer working. i dont want to loose everything on my old hard drive though. so can i buy an empty hard drive case and put my old hard drive in there and just connect it up with a usb cable? will this work? thanks for the help. jessie

So your saying you want to take out your PC's internal hard drive and put it in an external USB case so your Mac can access the data?

This is possible, the only thing that stands in your way is the file format of the hard drive. Windows ueses FAT32 or NTSF depending on how the drive was formated or setup. Mac OS X can read both FAT32 and NTSF file formats but, it can only write data to the FAT32 format. So if the hard drive is in the NTSF format you can only read data from it and not write data to it, so it'll act much like a CD-ROM disc does.

As long as the Mac your getting is a modern one with Mac OS X you should have no problems getting the drive to work as long as it is in the proper format.

 

[skwij]

I actually did something like this with my IntelMac, as the "old" HDD had XPpro and a tonne of stuff I didn't want to lose at the time.

Believe it or not, most of the info was able to be imported to the "new" HDD, especially pictures, mp3 files etc. Documents were iffy, but most came over seamlessly.

Go ahead and hook everything up. There's nothing to lose, and potentially this is an easy way to transfer your unloseables to your new machine.

Either that or back up everything to DVD, but that will take a lot of DVDs, depending on the size of the old HDD and the info on it.