Trasferring data from XP HDD question

[chriskzoo]

I am assuming this will work, but will pass it by you guys. My XP machine died and the mother board needed replacing, so I bought a Mac. Now to get the data off my old HDD, I should just be able to pop that drive into a hard drive enclosure, plug it in, and be able to read/copy the files, right?

 

[mad jew]

If it's formatted as FAT32 then you'll be able to read/write with it however if it's NTFS (which is much more likely), then you'll only be able to get the data from it (read), not put data onto it (write) AFAIK.

 

[chriskzoo]

OK cool, I just need to be able to copy the data over, not write to the drive.

Once I have everything, can that drive then be formatted via OS X to use as a backup drive?

 

[mad jew]

You should be able to reformat it using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder but I've never done it myself.

 

[belvdr]

To reformat it, simply use Disk Utility. It will reformat it for you. I can guarantee it is NTFS, because Windows XP will not format a large drive as FAT32.

 

[mad jew]

To reformat it, simply use Disk Utility. It will reformat it for you. I can guarantee it is NTFS, because Windows XP will not format a large drive as FAT32.

Windows XP will keep the FAT32 formatting if you do an upgrade from an older version of Windows (anything back to 98 form memory).