Help moving files to new computer

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nickkelbackk

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Nov 4, 2008
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Soon I will be building my computer(parts are in mail) and I was thinking about how I was doing to get all of my files from my macbook running leopard to my new computer that will be running vista 64-bit. Does anyone know any apps or anything to help me? Thank you and if this is not in the right forum, mods could you move it.I have a 500gb WD external. I read somewhere that mac files won't work on windows and vice versa
 
As long as the drive is formatted FAT32 it will be fine. OS X and Vista can both read/write to the FAT filing system. If you have the external formatted to "Mac OS Extended" then Windows can not read the drive.

You can find out what the drive is formatted as by going into finder and right-clicking the external drive and selecting "Get Info"

finder.png

The highlighted part is where you should be looking.

Other than that, it's all drag and drop like usual.
 
nickkelbackk said:
my drive is formatted as Mac OS extended (journaled) so is there anyway to change it to FAT32
Click to expand...

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the only way to change the file system would be to reformat it to FAT32.

I think you have 3 options, two free, one will cost ya $50.

-Option 1
Move all the files from the external to your Mac. Format FAT32, move the files back onto the external.

-Option 2
Transfer everything via the network. This could take some time, depending on the size of the data you need to transfer over.

-Option 3
Buy MacDrive. This will allow you to read and write to a Mac OS Extended drive(HSF+)I use MacDrive in conjunction with BootCamp and it works very well. It's also nice for creating Mac bootable DVDs from Windows.
 
In this day and age, the most common, and possibly the easiest solution would be to copy the files over a network. Almost every home now (especially of the readers of this forum) has an internal network courtesy of some type of router. While it never hurts to use an external drive as a backup device, the network would work as well, especially in sharing files down the road.
 
Ok so I have been reading some more and VIsta only supports NTFS. So now I need to figure how to convert Mac OS extened format into NTFS Format
 
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