Mac question (file transfer)
 

I had to connect my PC laptop hard drive to my Mac as I had a virus/worm which was boot looping everything. All is good as I have the files I want now copied from my hard drive to the Mac. Now, when I go to connect my ACTUAL (PC) external hard drive (not the one I had to take out of the laptop), it tells me that I cannot copy anything to that folder. The Mac seems to be treating this external like a finalized CD or something.

Can anyone help me with this?

what os are you running on the mac and what is the external drive formatted as?

Just got a band new Mac desktop so I guess whatever the newest is (it's my wife's...) and the external is a PC one.

If I were to reformat it as a Mac external hard drive, I'd lose everything on it right? If so, how would I go about using an external between the two computers. Somewhere there has to be a way to use it between both computers or else I have no way currently to move the files back.

How is the external hard drive formated?

You need to know if the HDD is formatted as FAT32 or NTFS

It is formatted as NTFS.

I havent used it before, but apparently macfuse allows Mac to read/write NTFS. Hope that helps!

Wow, I am such a Mac noob, how do you use this? I cant find directions anywhere!

Can anyone throw me a bone here? I'm not sure how to use this macfuse thing. I have it installed but have no idea what to do after that.

Another thought...having already backed up my info on the Mac, can I reformat the external to Fat32 or whatever and then use that format with PC?

In other words, will PC read, and allow me to copy, fat32?

This info is probably a little late...Usually, not always, but usually, you have to reformat an external hard drive in order for the Mac OS to recognize it and be useable. By default, it seems that hard drive manufacturers set them to work in a Windows environment which leads to the need to reformat it to work with a Mac.

Hardware is definitely not my specialty.

Never used macfuse though, but, found this: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/FAQ

I believe a Mac can natively read fat32, and Windows can certainly read it.

Ok, I'm ready to reformat my external but, while using my PC laptop, I only have the option to reformat in NTFS? WTF! (fun with acronyms!)

How to format external hard drive to FAT32 in Windows
;)