Help me make the switch

August 29, 2006 7:31 PM

Can I make the switch and keep my PC hard drives?

I'm thinking about switching to this Mac. iMovie and iPhoto have really pulled me over the edge. (Every software title I've tried for making/editing home movies on my PC has been a total head ache and iMovie is so easy) What I'd like to do is yank my hard drives from my PC and buy something like this. The bigger question is, how do I know if my current drives are SATA or ATA, or something else? Any other (cheaper) suggestions for attaching my old hard drives to my new Macbook?

posted by smithmac_99 to computers & internet (10 answers total)

How many drives do you have? They make single drive enclosures that are more like $40, and you could just buy two or however many.

How to tell whether it's SATA or ATA? Look at the cables in the back. If it has a really wide, flat cable with about 40 parallel wires, it's ATA. If it has a cable that looks like a normal cable, it's SATA. Those are pretty much the only likely options, nowadays. The older they are, the more likely they are ATA, and vice-versa.
posted by smackfu at 7:37 PM on August 29, 2006

If you don't want to open the PC to look, open My Computer, right click the drive, select properties, then the hardware tab. You will find the hard drive model(s) listed there. Check on the appropriate manufacturer's websites for information on the drives. They should (hopefully!) have it.
posted by shepd at 7:54 PM on August 29, 2006

Seems to me that bigger question is: are these drives formatted NTFS? Because according to the most current info I can find on Apple's site:

Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 work with local NTFS-formatted volumes. The volume will be read-only.

Warning: NTFS formatted drives cannot be used in a Macintosh (except as read-only with Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 as noted above). If you attempt to use a NTFS formatted disk, upon starting up the Mac OS will prompt you to format the drive. Do not format the drive, doing so will erase the contents of the drive. If you have an NTFS formatted disk, you must use another method to transfer the data from the PC to the Macintosh. (via, updated April 14, 2006)

posted by misterbrandt at 9:07 PM on August 29, 2006

They both ARE formatted NTFS...what is "another method" that would enable me to transfer the data from the PC to the Macintosh?
posted by smithmac_99 at 9:42 PM on August 29, 2006

Ethernet! Put a network card in the PC if it doesn't already have one (they cost about $5) and wire the machines together with a crossover cable. The mac understands windows filesharing, so you can just share all the stuff on the PC and then copy it over.

When you're done, you can pull the PC HDDs and format them for use in the mac, perhaps in external USB/firewire cases.
posted by polyglot at 10:00 PM on August 29, 2006

Oh, you can transfer all your files to the Mac, and then reformat the drives as HSF+ or whatever the native format is. You just can't drop the NTFS drives into an external enclosure and write to them.

How much data on the PC drives? How big is the iMac drive? Can you shuffle data to get at least one NTFS drive clean at a time to reformat?
posted by misterbrandt at 10:05 PM on August 29, 2006

>wire the machines together with a crossover cable

I hear Mac ethernet will "just work" even if it's only a regular cable nowadays.

Another "another method" would be burning them to DVDs of course. Of course if your answer to "how much content" is "500GB" just ignore me.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 11:34 PM on August 29, 2006

if you are thinking about buying a mac, WAIT a few weeks. Merom processors just hit the laptop market and rumors say Apple is upgrading everything. Sometime before 2nd week in September according to the internets.
posted by sophist at 2:21 AM on August 30, 2006

I seriously doubt the MacBook is going to be updated with the Merom. The MacBook Pro, sure. Still, it might be worth waiting a couple of weeks, as sophist says.

Also, make sure you get 1GB of RAM as a minimum.
posted by salmacis at 2:30 AM on August 30, 2006

There are a few different things you could do, depending on your geek cred and available hardware. I think I've done just about all of them at one point or another.

If you plan on keeping your Windows box around and you have a wireless router, you can just network the two. Set up file sharing on the XP box and take advantage of the Macbook's built-in 802.11g for speedy file transfers.

Of course, if you're sick of Redmond, you could install Ubuntu Linux and build a file server. I just finished doing that, and I'm liking the results.

If your PC hardware is disappearing for some reason, you could "borrow" a large hard drive from your local Greatest Value Yellow-Tag or Electrical Component Village Red-Circle store. Make sure it's at least as big as your two drives added together, and also make sure you can float a few hundred bucks on your credit card (or bank account) for a day or two. Put your two hard drives into external cases as described above (I'd recommend FireWire if you're buying a Macbook). Plug all of them into the Macbook, then:
- Format the new drive as the Mac recommends
- Copy all of the data from your two old drives to the new one
- (This is usually where I throw in an "idiot-proofing" test. unplug the old drives, so that only the new drive is connected. Open a few files to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be.)
- Format your old drives as HFS+. MAKE SURE THAT YOUR DATA IS ALL COPIED TO THE NEW DRIVE FIRST.
- Copy all of your data from the new drive back to the old drive(s). This is also a good time to organize it if it's scattered across the disks. You can copy EVERYTHING if you want, to be safe, but you'll be wasting GB's of space with Windows installation files and needless programs.
- Format the new drive (as whatever Windows format it came in), put it back in the box, and abuse the "no-questions-asked" return policy of your selected electronics vendor. Kinda shady, but I'd be lying if I said I've never done it.
posted by cebailey at 7:03 AM on August 30, 2006