Apple computer accessing a Windows hard drive?

May 25, 2004 10:53 AM

Can I access a Windows 2000 formatted hard drive in an external hard drive enclosure with an Apple computer? [m-to-the-i]

My computer died, and I figured this was a good time to make the switch. Now, I have a 80gig hard drive that is full of data that needs to be accessed. I can either but a cheapie $300 barebones and put the drive in there and load samba in the apple, or I can put the drive in an enclosure and access it that way. I just don't know if that is possible.

posted by plemeljr to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Any idea what the partitions were formatted as? If it's a flavor of FAT, you should have no problems. If it's NTFS it might be tricky.

I know of several utilities for accessing a NTFS partition, but they're all Linux utilities. You should be able to compile to OSX, but I've never actually done this.

Also, something that recently bit me in the ass is that some drive enclosures apparently have a bug in the firmware that renders them totally incompatible with OSX.
posted by bshort at 11:04 AM on May 25, 2004

I tried this and couldn't get it to work but my drive was from win 98, not 2000.
posted by dobbs at 11:05 AM on May 25, 2004

It was formatted in NTFS Win2K. I actually think it would be easier [but a bit more expensive] to just buy a cheap barebones and put the drive in there and access it with samba.
posted by plemeljr at 11:07 AM on May 25, 2004

VirtualPC adds an NTFS driver to Mac OSX, but I'm not sure you get to use it from the Finder -- you might have to monkey around with mounting the drive by hand. That might not be worth the price of the product, but if you've already got an investment in Windows software you may get something out of having an emulator rigged up anyways.

In the worst case, if you have VPC set up, you can mount the drive on the emulated Windows box and copy your stuff over a loopback network.

A FAT driver ships with OSX and can be a pain with FAT32, but works OK with the NT variant FAT.
posted by majick at 11:43 AM on May 25, 2004

It looks like Panther supports read-only support for NTFS shares.
posted by birdherder at 1:10 PM on May 25, 2004

If you do end up tossing the drive in a cheapie PC (looks like some people can't get the NTFS disk mounting to work), you won't need to install Samba on the Mac; it's already there.
posted by kindall at 4:31 PM on May 25, 2004

What about putting linux on a partition (or a ppc gentoo livecd), and then you can at least move the data from the NTFS drive (which you'll get read access to, not write) and then saving it to your HFS+ partition. Do they include NTFS and other FS drivers in PPC kernel builds? Something I should look up.. but that seems easier than buying a whole other PC.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:41 PM on May 25, 2004

OK, to answer my question, yes, yes you can. OS.X will mount the drive, but you can only read from the drive. So I ended up moving 40+ gigs from the externall harddrive, compared both sets of data, reformated the drive, and moved the data back to the hard drive. It made for a much fun series of nights.
posted by plemeljr at 7:11 AM on June 18, 2004