HELP with using external hard drive

Can anyone please help? I have been using Windows based PCs for a majority of my life. I recently purchased a Macbook. I have thousands of songs saved on a Maxtor external hard drive. I recently connected the HD to my Macbook and was able to successfully copy over all of the photos I have saved and only few of the audio files but not all. I checked the audio files are saved in itunes format. Why can I not copy all of my music over? Please help! When I connect HD to PC I see the missing files that cannot been seen when I connect my HD to my Macbook. Bizare, don't you think?

Any chance that the files not showing up on the Mac have file names starting with a period (.)?
Patrick

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    Hi,
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    Here is a quick suggestion for you:
    Download Virtual Box (free PC Emulator for Mac) and install Windows 7 on your Mac (don't worry about activating it yet, as you don't need to keep it more than a few hours).  You can tell Virtual Box to use the ISO file as the DVD drive for your virtual Windows computer, so no need to burn a disk.
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    Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
    Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
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    I am having problems with an external hard drive and found your Email in yahoo answers.
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    that was my backup!
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    There are supposedly Mac based recovery tools that can also recover FAT, but those would likely need a second drive and the results might not be pretty (files, everywhere, maybe without original file names).
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    mwmmartin wrote:
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    LittleGuy16 wrote:
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    What did Apple tell you about what they did (or did not) find here?
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  • Every time I try to back up my Macbook Pro with an external hard drive using Time Machine, I receive the error of "the disk does not have enough space". I have a 500GB hard drive and only 120GB Macbook. It worked fine before the latest Maverick's

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    My guess would be it has created an entirely new backup of your drive when you upgraded to Mavericks.
    See Here: http://pondini.org/TM/1.html
    And here: http://pondini.org/TM/9.html
    Peruse the whole site. There is a lot of information there.

  • Problem with Time Capsule used with an External Hard Drive (with it's own power supply)

    I have a mid 2012 Macbook Pro with Mavericks installed. I have the latest Time Capsule (802.11 ac) with an external hard drive hooked up via the USB port. The external hard drive was taken from an older Mac desktop machine and is formatted correctly (Mac OS Extended Journaled). The external hard drive has it's own power supply and shows up fine when connected directly to my laptop.
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    Welcome to Mavericks.. and its new concept of network drives not just being hard to find like in Mountain Lion but totally invisible.
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    Change over to AFP by manually mounting the TC drives.
    I strongly recommend the first thing you do is change the TC names to SMB standard.. that just helps.
    Short, no spaces and pure alphanumeric.
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    Store the password in your keychain.
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  • Can you help me with my External Hard Drive?

    Hey everyone,
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    * Both are formatted as FAT32 because I need to use them on Mac at home and Windows at work.
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    * Restarting the Macbook and plugging them in as it loads.
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    * That trick where you take out the battery and power source, hold down the On button for 5s, then hold Apple + P + R + Option while the Macbook turns back on.
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    Have you tried opening them in a Finder window? Also, you might boot to your Install DVD and launch Disc Utility to verify and repair both permissions and your drive.
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  • HT201250 I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer with my external hard drive. I am getting a brand new iMac this month and was wondering what is the process of using this back up to restore my new computer exactly how my old computer was?

    I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer with my external hard drive. I am getting a brand new iMac this month and was wondering what is the process of using this back up to restore my new computer exactly how my old computer was? I want to make sure I will still have various important files on my new computer, like my songs in iTunes, my photos in iPhoto, etc, etc. Thanks so much in advance!

    Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
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  • Intermittently using Time Machine with an External Hard Drive

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    JohnHusk wrote:
    Ok, Kappy answered some questions I had about how Time Machine works with an external hard drive.
    After doing more reading about Time Machine, I found out that a person can, for example, leave the drive powered-off for a couple of weeks and only periodically or intermittently use Time Machine for back up.
    If you go several days between backups, Time Machine may have to do a "deep traversal," comparing every folder on your system to the backups, to determine what's changed and needs to be backed-up. This depends on the volume of changes, so can happen after an OSX update, but in other circumstances might be after several days. This isn't a big problem, but it does take longer, and the more data you have, the longer it takes.
    Worse, after an extended period, Time Machine may do a new, full backup of your entire system, rapidly filling-up your TM drive.
    If that's the way you want to back up, Time Machine is not the backup app for you. One of it's main features is the way it can do quick hourly backups of what's changed, so you have an excellent chance of recovering a previous version (or versions) when you change or delete something in error, or a file comes up corrupted, or your Mac fails.
    Why don't you want to just leave the drive connected and Time Machine running, to protect you best, as it was designed to do?
    For alternatives designed to do less frequent backups, see Kappy's post on Basic Backup.

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