How do I put my removed PC hard drive onto my new imac

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Level 1

10 points

How do I put my removed PC hard drive onto my new imac

I have a new imac 21.5-inch, mid 2014 running OS X10.9.4 and want to transfer my photos and docs from my PC whose mother board died. I have removed the hard drive and bought an adapter so it can connect to the imac through a usb 2 port. When I plug in the hard drive it gives me 3 desktop icons: "system"," os" and "hp-recovery". The System says I have 78 MB out of 105 MB free, the OS says I have 638 GB free out of 737 GB, and the HP-Recovery says I have 1.59 free out of 12.97 GB. But I can't get to any info on the hard drive. What do I need to do now so I can put that information on the iMac?

Thanks!

Posted on Jul 13, 2014 1:11 PM

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Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Jul 13, 2014 1:44 PM in response to mikech

How to transfer data from a PC to a Mac and Switch Basics: Migrate your Windows files to your Mac, should get you started.

iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), SL & ML, G4 450 MP w/Leopard, 9.2.2

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Answer 2

mikech Author

Level 1

10 points

Jul 13, 2014 3:46 PM in response to baltwo

baltwo,

Thanks for your response - but since I don't have a workable PC, I can't use apple's migration. All I have is the hard drive from the old PC. So I need to be able to access the "now" portable hard drive from the PC and be able to put that info on my iMac.

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Answer 3

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Jul 13, 2014 3:55 PM in response to mikech

The first article states:

Portable hard drives that can be used to transfer data from a PC to a Mac include…USB-based drives or storage devices.

If that doesn't do the trick, then I'm out of ideas.

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Answer 4

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Jul 13, 2014 4:01 PM in response to mikech

The PC drive is a Windows drive formatted with NTFS. You need to be able to read it to transfer data.

You can use NTFS-3g, Tuxera of Paragon NTFS drivers for MAC OS X and they can read the files. You can search for these and find where to get these from.

The Apple read-only NTFS driver for bootcamp requires a few hacks to read external NTFS drive.

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Answer 5

tbirdvet

Level 6

13,635 points

Jul 13, 2014 4:09 PM in response to mikech

The HP partition you want to try to access is the system one.

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