Getting files off my pc to my mac. using an external hard drive

i have brought a seagate hard drive. i am trying to get the stuff of my pc on to my mac. everytime i format the hard drive in the mac. i connect it to the pc and it says the drive needs formatting.
i need help haha

Format the drive as NTFS on a PC, transfer the data, and if desired when done, format it on the Mac.
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How do I transfer files from my PC to my mac on an external hard drive?

I have an HP external hard drive that I have put all of my files from my PC on. I am trying to move them onto my Mac, but I have absolutely no idea what to do. As a warning, I am kind of computer illiterate.

Have a read here http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2518
If your Mac is running OSX 10.7 Lion you might wanna use this http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4796
Stefan

How do i convert my music and pics over from windows to mac using a external hard drive.

New mac user. How do i convert my files from windows to mac using external hard drive. I am using a Seagate freeagent go flex.

leave as is and add NTFS driver to write to the drive / migrate maybe / reading NTFS drives isn't always perfect, some times external drive case has trouble mounting or staying mounted and suffers slow copy speed after awhile or with large files which is why I suggest Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X.

HT4796 How do I transfer music from a PC to a Mac using an external hard drive?

I just purchased a MacBook Pro and have all my music and pictures saved to an external harddrive but I can not figure out how to transfer my music over from the hard drive without issues.

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
To transfer the music from the external drive to your Mac, it depends if you want to save your music in a folder or in iTunes.
To copy your music to your iTunes library, simply open iTunes and open a Finder window with your external drive open. Then, just drag your music to the iTunes window, so your music will be transferred to your computer.
The process is the same if you want to copy your music to another folder, but instead of opening iTunes, open a Finder window with the folder where you want to copy your music

When I installed iTunes 11 on a windows 8 system I get the music, but the screen dosn't have te library on the left. The left side of iTunes is the name. I got the songs by using a external hard drive. What have I done wrong?

When I installed iTunes 11 on a Windows 8 system the installation did not seem to work correctly. There is no sidebar and no ribbon w/ File, Edit, etc. I tried to use an external hard drive to move from an older computer using XP to the new one w/ Wdw 8. I thought if I deleted iTunes from the Wdw 8, I could reload it. Apparently I did not delete the music files because they appeared in the format I complained about, no side bar or ribbon. Can anyone walk me through the process of deleting everything and reinstalling? I am not very computer savy so a step by step would really be appreciated.
Thank you,

ctrl B - Show menus
ctrl S - Show sidebar

After clean install of Snow Leopard, Time Machine did not restore all files. When I try to restore these files I get "Not enough disk space" error. What do I need to do to get these important files back onto my Mac from my external hard drive??

After clean install of Snow Leopard, Time Machine did not restore all files. When I try to restore these files I get "Not enough disk space" error. What do I need to do to get these important files back onto my Mac from my external hard drive??

Janet.b wrote:
About 3 years old...pretty dated now I guess. Am thinking I may just need to have it upgraded by a Mac tech.
For what the Apple Store's charge you can buy almost buy a new computer.
Just for giggles I brought my old laptop in for a drive upgrade and asked, they wanted $600 for a drive that only cost $120 at the time and it was a slow 5,400 RPM drive. The new Mac's of a similar make were going for $1000.
I did the drive replacement myself, got a faster drive of better quality for $300 instead.
Then another time I asked for a RAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB, they wanted to charge $400 + $35 for the labor.
The same RAM is on Crucial.com for $90 and all I need is a 00 micro phillips screwdriver.
So you see what's going on here.
I think what you should do, if your out of warranty/AppleCare, is to call up the local PC tech guy who also does Mac's and have them fix you right up.
They can offer more personalized care which you need. Clone your old drive to the new and everything.
With Apple they are overworked at the Genius Bar and just place roadblocks so you buy a new machine instead.
For instance, all new iMac's now have proprietary drive software installed on the hard drives for heat monitoring. So now the only choice a user has is to bring their iMac into a Apple Store for a very expensive drive upgrade, which a person then decides the money is better spent buying a new machine.

I was trying to back up my mac by using my external hard drive. Without realizing it, time machine erased all my backups from my other computers. Is there any way to recover these files? I can't even get the external hard drive to work on my pc.

I was trying to use my external hard drive to back up my mac computer. It had files on it from my pc computer. Time machine erased all my existing files. (I thought it was only going to erase the duplicate files and rewrite them). Is there anyway to recover these files from my external hard drive. My mac has renamed the hard drive time maching and it will no longer show up on my pc. What can I do?

Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think?

I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?

I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?
What I am ultimately wanting to do is make more room on my computer by backing up all of my files onto the external hard drive and then deleting them off of my computer. However, neededing to be able to retrieve them from the external hard drive later down the road.
From what I have read and am trying to understand, is that I probably shouldn't have used time machine. I need to use the external hard drive like a basic flash drive where I can put things on and get things off without having it automatically update through time machine everytime I connect it to my computer.
Not tech savvy at all and barely understand basics. I need very simple and easy to understand explanations.

sydababy wrote:
and then deleting them off of my computer.
BIG BIG MISTAKE ..... youre making a linchpin deathtrap for your data trying to shove everything on a single fragile HD.
Dont suffer the tragedy other people make, buy another or 2 more HD, theyre cheap as dust.
The number of people who have experienced terror by having a single external HD backup is enormous. One failure that WILL HAPPEN, and kaput,......all gone!
Dont do it, its all about redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
follow here:
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection
Deleting them off your computer is fine....having only ONE copy is extremely BAD.
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.

Can some please provide instructions on how to import an iPhoto library from an old Mac to a new Mac without getting a bunch of duplicates? I tried transferring my pictures using an external hard drive and then copying it to the Pictures folder on my Mac

Can someone please provide instructions on how to import an iPhoto library from an old Mac to a new Mac without getting a bunch of duplicates? I tried transferring my pictures using an external hard drive and then copying it to the Pictures folder on my new Mac. I ended up getting a bunch of duplicates. My old Mac has an older version of iPhoto while the new Mac has iPhoto '11. Is that the cause of the problem? Please advise. Thanks.

Simply copy the iPhoto Library from the Pictures Folder on the old Machine to the Pictures Folder on the new Machine.
Then launch iPhoto. That's it.
This moves photos, events, albums, books, keywords, slideshows and everything else.
Regards
TD

Hello, I have two questions on time capsule I can only have it on my external hd files and free up my internal memory to my mac I can use an external hard drive, in my case a lacie rugged as shared memory for my two computers

Hello, I have two questions on time capsule I can only have it on my external hd files and free up my internal memory to my mac I can use an external hard drive, in my case a lacie rugged as shared memory for my two computers

I have a mackbook pro and an iMac if I buy a time capsule 2tb airport, I can use it with time machine and what would be the best way to use it.
There is no particular setup required for TM.. both computers will create their own backup sparsebundle which is like a virtual disk.. Pondini explains the whole thing if you read the reference I gave you.
and how to use time capsule airport whit other external hd to use my old lacie airport with the new time capsule
Up to you.. you can plug the external drive into the TC and enjoy really slow file transfers or you can plug it into your computer and use it as external drive.. which is faster than the TC.. and TM can include it in the backup.
Again everything is explained in the reference.. you are not reading it.

I can't transfer files from my mac to an external hard drive. what can i do?

i have tried to transfer files from my mac to my external hard drive but i just couldn't.. help me

leemamacita wrote:
i have tried to transfer files from my mac to my external hard drive but i just couldn't.. help me
More information would help. How is the external connected? Does the external appear on your Desktop? Has the external been formatted for a Mac? What method do you use to transfer files? When you try to move a file to the external, what does happen?

Is there a way to get my photos off an old time machine backup from an external hard drive?

Is there a way to get my photos off an old time machine backup from an external hard drive?

You will have to connect the Time Machine HDD and click on the Icon. You will see one folder called Backups.backupdb. Click on that and you will have to continue until you find the home folder. The iPhoto library (where the pictures are, not the application) will probably be in your pictures folder. You will have to drag that to your desk top. Then you will have access to individual images.
Ciao.

Connecting 2 Macs to an external hard drive

Hi,
I have an iMac G4 and a Mac Mini (with Panther on them). The hard drives for these two macs are running out of space due to a large library of music, video, and photo. I am thinking of getting an external hard drive and move all these to there.
My question is, am I able to hook these two macs to the external hard drive and access the file? Do I have to partition the hard drive into two so that each Mac will have its own partition on the hard drive?
Thanks, guys.
iMac G4, Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.3.9) Mac Mini

An external hard drive can be shared by two computers, but both computers can't be plugged into the hard drive at the exact same moment. However, if you have iTunes or iPhoto running on the one computer with the hard drive, you can share your music and pictures to the other one. You could also turn on File Sharing on the computer with the hard drive and then you could connect to the hard drive across your network to access or share other types of files.
-Doug

I am not able to use my external hard drive with my Mac.

I am not able to use my external hard drive with my Mac. It was initially used with my Windows 7 laptop. Now when I insert my Hard drive in the Mac, it doesn't allow me to delete, format, make folders or copy new files on to my hard drive. I no longer have a Windows PC and am stuck. I tried going to Disc utilities,selected my HD, clicked on Erase and then changed the Format type to MS-DOS (FAT) but no luck .. Any other steps or advice?

It was likely formatted in NTFS which is readable by the Mac, but not writeable.
You should be able to reformat the disk in Disk Utility.
After having copied all the data off of it, you can try re-partitioning it.
Select the hard drive in the disk list in Disk Utility. Hard drives are the device itself, are left-aligned in the list, and are usually named with the manufacturer, size, and model number.
Click on the Partition tab.
Select 1-partition from the partition menu.
Click the Options button and set to GUID
Set the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Give the Volume a name and click Apply.

I recently used an external hard drive to back up photos etc from my mac, I didn't do a full system back up. Since then a finder window titled 'client node' keeps popping up every time i hit the spacebar. Can anyone help me please stop this happening?

I recently used an external hard drive to back up photos etc from my mac, I didn't do a full system back up. Since then a finder window titled 'client node' keeps popping up every time i hit the spacebar. Can anyone help me please stop this happening?

Click on it, choose Get Info from the File menu, and check the format.
If it's formatted as NTFS, reformat it as MS-DOS, exFAT, or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as desired, or install software such as Paragon NTFS on the computer.
If it's formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, use the Disk Utility's Repair Disk command on it; this may also happen for a flash drive which is about to fail.
If it's formatted as Mac OS Extended, click Authenticate and provide your administrator password, or change the permissions on that specific folder in its Get Info window.
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Getting files off my pc to my mac. using an external hard drive

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