How can I use my external hard drive from PC to Mac without reformatting???
Ok, so I am computer illiterate. I have always used PC's and have just bought a MacBook. When I plug in my external hard drive into my new Mac, it says it needs to be reformatted to use with Mac, which would cause all data to be erased. Is there anyway to get around this?
Mac OS X can read FAT32 but not NTFS, and it sounds like your external Hard drive is in NTFS. You can either borrow a friends external drive to copy your content across, re format the drive as FAT32, and copy the data back or there are ways to get Mac OS x to read NTFS...
Mac OS X can read FAT32 but not NTFS, and it sounds like your external Hard drive is in NTFS. You can either borrow a friends external drive to copy your content across, re format the drive as FAT32, and copy the data back or there are ways to get Mac OS x to read NTFS...
Actually... even with an NTFS drive you shouldn't be prompted to format the drive. It is correct that you cannot natively write to an NTFS drive, but you can read them. There is no reason to format the drive if you just need to read from it and you should not be prompted to do so. However, it is normal to get the prompt from TimeMachine asking if you want to use the drive as your TimeMachine backup... which would require you to format the drive.
Please clarify exactly what message you're receiving.
The Maxtor Onetouch 4 is pre-formatted as NTFS and cannot be written to a Macintosh.
It then goes on to explain the steps to resolve the issue which results in all data being erased. Is there a way I can get around this in a simple manner?
OK... as Woggledog indicated, OS X cannot write to NTFS formatted drives. NTFS is a proprietary Microsoft format. Conversely, Windows can neither read nor write to an OS X formatted drive.
Both Windows and OS X can read and write to FAT32 (this is a fairly old format). The down side to FAT32 is that the largest file you can work with is 4GB. That is probably fine for most people... but if you're working with large files (videos, virtual drive images, large backup files, etc...) FAT32 is not suitable. There are applications that you can purchase for both Macs and Windows machines that will allow them to read and write to the other format.
An immediate option provided you have the space on either your PC or Mac is to create a folder on either machine and move everything from your external drive into that folder. Then you can format the drive to FAT32 and then copy everything back over to the external drive (and delete it from your Mac or PC's internal drive). It might take some time depending on how much data you have... but you'll only have to do it once... and this is assuming you have enough space on one of you machines to copy the data from your external drive.
