This is an impromptu post but based on circumstances that occurred earlier today I decided to make it. For reasons beyond this blog I needed to boot my old Windows PC today to retrieve some information from it. It has been a couple of weeks since I last turned the machine on but at that time there were no warnings of failures or anything out of the ordinairy. When I turned the machine on today it continually rebooted time and time again, I thought all information was lost. But then I remembered I had my trusty Mac and an external hard drive enclosure in which I can try to connect the drive from my PC to my MacBook Pro in order to retrieve the data.

I removed the non-booting drive from my PC — scope is beyond this article — and set it up inside my external hard drive enclosure. I recently purchased an enclosure along with an internal drive as a way of making my own external drive. This route is a lot cheaper than buying one of the prebuilt solutions and is quite easy to assemble. Anyway, I removed the drive I was using for backups (which is an upcoming article) and attached the drive from my PC. I connected this new drive to my MacBook Pro and instantly it was recognized and the drive icon appeared on my Desktop.

I was still worried for a bit because this drive was formatted as NTFS, a filesystem that Mac’s are not supposed to be able to see. But luckily enough I was able to not only see the data on the drive but move the needed files over to the Mac in a matter of seconds. It really is as easy as copying and pasting or dragging and dropping.

When you are done with the drive make sure to unmount it first by dragging it to the trash can. This will change the trash icon to an eject icon and you will hear the hard drive power down letting you know it is safe to be disconnected from the Mac.

I will discuss this process in more detail at a later date but wanted to inform everyone that it is possible and extremely easy to set up as long as you have the equipment available — which included a screw driver and a external hard drive enclosure with cables to connect to the Mac (these cables will come with the enclosure).

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 12:07 am and is filed under Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.