External hard drive from PC to iMac ?? I recently switched over from a Pc to a iMac , can i continue to use the external hard drive, that I used to back up photographs from my PC and...

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

I recently switched over from a Pc to a iMac , can i continue to use the external hard drive, that I used to back up photographs from my PC and plug it into my iMac, will there be any compatibility issues??

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

lone ranger wrote:

I recently switched over from a Pc to a iMac , can i continue to use the external hard drive, that I used to back up photographs from my PC and plug it into my iMac, will there be any compatibility issues??

I believe you'll have to format it for the Mac. Desktop?

Gary Truchelut Loc: Coldspring, TX

Plug it in and it will show up on your desktop. double click on it and see if it will open. I think your mac will recognize the drive and it should work. If not it will need formatting.

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

Thanks, I will try that...

Gary Truchelut wrote:

Plug it in and it will show up on your desktop. double click on it and see if it will open. I think your mac will recognize the drive and it should work. If not it will need formatting.

jwestman Loc: Grand Rapids, MI

Make sure you save the pictures you have on the drive before formatting because that will wipe it clean.

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

thank you, for your valuable advice...

jwestman wrote:

Make sure you save the pictures you have on the drive before formatting because that will wipe it clean.

haroldross Loc: Walthill, Nebraska

You should be fine with it. OSX can read FAT32 and NTFS formatted drives. To write to NTFS formatted drives you may have to purchase a third party app/driver for total access to the drive. I use Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X.

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

Thanks guy, for your valuable advice..

haroldross wrote:

You should be fine with it. OSX can read FAT32 and NTFS formatted drives. To write to NTFS formatted drives you may have to purchase a third party app/driver for total access to the drive. I use Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X.

minniev Loc: MIssissippi

It may work fine, but be aware that there could be problems. I never had any trouble with drives formatted FAT32 on my macs until we got to the Mavericks OS. Within a day of system upgrade, two of my drives began to misbehave, randomly dismounting themselves or being really stubborn to mount. It did not improve with Yosemite. I did a lot of research and found this is not rare with the latest versions of the OS.

I was successful in getting one drive back in line with reformatting. The other, a Buffalo drive, was hopeless, and I had to replace it. Buffalo says it is Apple's fault, Apple says it is Buffalo's problem (actually it is my problem, I had to buy a new drive).

So, my advice is try it, but if it starts acting funny, offload the images, reformat it in the traditional mac format, and then put the images back on it and see if that solves the problem. And henceforth, format new drives for mac usage before using them on the mac.

blackest Loc: Ireland

haroldross wrote:

You should be fine with it. OSX can read FAT32 and NTFS formatted drives. To write to NTFS formatted drives you may have to purchase a third party app/driver for total access to the drive. I use Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X.

Or you may not
http://www.cnet.com/news/how-to-manually-enable-ntfs-read-and-write-in-os-x/

The difference is that with each drive formatted as ntfs you need to add a mount point in fstab.

Ok if you have one or two ntfs drives you use regularly.

With the paragon ntfs package ($20) attach any NTFS formatted drive and wait a few seconds and it will be mounted read/write.

alternatively put that $20 towards a 2nd external drive copy the existing images to the new drive and reformat your existing drive. Always best to have 2 or more copies of images as a backup anyway.

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

Thanks, excellent idea!

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

I had a Seagate 1.5 TB drive on my PC, running windows 2000. I just plugged it into my iMac (mid 2011 model) and it just became another drive.

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

I just tried that, and it's exactly what happened
Problem solved!

SonoraDick Loc: Tucson

lone ranger wrote:

I just tried that, and it's exactly what happened
Problem solved!

Have you tried to write to the drive yet? I was advised at the Apple Store that the iMac I was considering might be able to read my existing drive but not write to it.

lone ranger Loc: Port Saint Lucie, Florida

I tried it, and it worked on my brand new iMac....

SonoraDick wrote:

Have you tried to write to the drive yet? I was advised at the Apple Store that the iMac I was considering might be able to read my existing drive but not write to it.