I recently wanted to copy some files from my friend’s Mac to my Windows PC, via an external hard drive, but strangely found that the Mac OSX was saying my hard disk was ‘read only’. After digging around I managed to piece together a workable solution. Also, my situation was that I needed a large amount of information to be moved at one go, so I could not use a flash drive.
Here’s the deal:
The NTFS file system typically used in Windows XP, is not Mac friendly, but the old FAT file system is. So what I did was to convert the file system and it worked fine.
Steps (Warning – will wipe out external hard drive used for file transfer):
- Backup your data and delete the partition on the external drive
- Create a new partition on the external hard drive and make sure it is FAT based.
- Make sure your partition is not above 32GB (Limitations on FAT system)
- Sit back and enjoy the file transfer from the Mac.
Don’t worry, you can convert your hard disk back to NTFS once you’re done, or just recreate the partition. Just backup your data before you do so. Of course, if you can just fit your files on a flash drive, that’s the easier way to go.
September 6th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Hi,
On a similar note… I bought a Mac Mini a while back which the developed some kind of fault and wouldn’t boot properly. I wanted the data off so found out about the option to use the Mac as some kind of external storage device.
Basically connected the Mac to my PC via a firewire cable. Powered on the Mac, holding down “T” key, and then it showed up as Disk Drive in Windows XP. Needed Macdrive software to be able to read it but there’s a free trial for that I think.
September 7th, 2006 at 12:39 am
Thanks Rob, that’s a great tip!
August 25th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I just this programme. It makes any HD writable without having to partition anything. http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2007/03/macfuse-news.html