setting up a new external harddrive to transfer photos between old 2009 macbook pro and windows pc
Hi Apple community!
here’s my overall goal: 1) back up my data with the 3-2-1 backup strategy, and 2) upgrade the hardware on my old Mac.
So, I am upgrading hardware (which I already have, ready to be installed) on my old mid-2009 15-in 2.53GHz MacBook Pro which is currently running El Cap 10.11.6. I want to improve its performance and eek out a few more years from it. However, before I mess with the hardware, I have 17,000+ photos that need to be backed up (yeah yeah I know, better late than never). I have iCloud uploading them in the background so that they get on the cloud, but I also want 1 or 2 copies on a hard drive just in case.
I bought a Silicon Power Armor A60 5TB USB 3.2 portable hard drive to move all of my photos onto so that I can also access them from my much newer Lenovo pc. The portable HD came formatted in NTFS, which I quickly discovered is only readable on Mac. I’ve read all the how-tos and watched at least 25 different YouTube videos to try to troubleshoot, but am still running into issues and my max will not recognize the PHD to write files onto it!
so far I have tried:
1) format disk to exFAT on windows (Mac could not mount it)
2) tried reformatting disk to exFAT on Mac (ran into an error about not enough space)
3) pulled up cmd on windows and added an efi partition (via YouTube instructions, I am NOT fluent in cmd)
4) went back to max and supposedly “successfully” reformatted the disk to exFAT, however the max STILL cannot recognize or mount it!! What am I missing?!?! (Before you ask, yes I have already tried unplugging it, restarting the computer, and plugging the PHD back in. Same results.)
thanks so much for any help!
MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11