Transfer Files PC to Mac with Seagate Port HD

<p>Will I be able to transfer all my photo files from a PC to a new IMac with my existing Seagate Freeagent portable hard drive. I'm about to purchase an Imac and looking for the easiest way to transfer files. I understand some hard drives have to be re-formatted. Thanks ... Ray.</p>

<p>If the portable harddrive uses a FAT32 filesystem you will not have any problems.<br /> If it uses a filesystem only supported by MAC-OS or one only supported<br /> by your PC, you will have to reformat to FAT.</p>

<p>What not buy an external HD for your MAC?</p>

<p>They are pretty reasonable now!</p>

<p>Then you could copy the files to the new HD and you'd have a second place just in case.</p>

<p>I recently bought a 2 terabyte Lacie external for about $200.00 from B&H.</p>

<p>There are programs that allow such transfers, but I would be concerned about losing info in the process. Seagate may have such software.<br>

I would recommend taking Bill's solution seriously...I have two hard drives in a RAID that I use with my iMac and it works very well.</p>

<p>Just to note: try to keep your files on FAT32 below 2 or 4 GB (I forget which) apiece, there's a hard filesize limit in FAT32 that doesn't exist in NTFS that most PC's use for their internal disk.</p>

<p>Hi Ray. I've done just that. I've moved from a PC running Win XP to a new iMac (with Leopard). I had all my photos, both jpgs and raw, backed on to a Seagate Freeagant. I just moved them all across and they work perfectly on the new iMac. Incidentally, rather than dumping my PC which is about 6 years old and was running very slowly, I've now installed Linux Ubuntu to have a play with it and I'm very impressed! - Harry</p>

<p>-- "Just to note: try to keep your files on FAT32 below 2 or 4 GB (I forget which)"</p>

<p>The max-filesize for FAT32 is 4GB.</p>

<p>Another source of trouble might eventually be Windows ... in its newer versions it will not let you format an external harddrive as FAT ... only as NTFS ... in that case, use the dos/windows-port of the linux tool "mk2dosfs" ... http://www1.mager.org/mkdosfs/</p>

<p>Ray, </p>

<p>Mac OS X will read and write to FAT32, and read from NTFS file systems. If you move your files to the portable hard drive with the Windows system, regardless of anything else, you will be able to read and copy them onto the iMac without any problems at all. </p>

<p>If you want to use the portable hard drive <strong>after</strong> you do that, connect it to the iMac and use the supplied <strong><em>Disk Utility</em></strong> application on Mac OS X to reformat it. You can format it for <em>Mac OS </em><em>Extended (Journaled) </em>native file system which is not usable with Windows, or you can format it for <em>MS-DOS (FAT)</em> which is FAT32 and read/write from both Windows and Mac OS X. </p>

<p>Mac OS X will allow you to format arbitrarily large drives as FAT32. I don't know what the largest possible volume is, but I've formatted 120, 320 and 500 G drives for FAT32 without any problems. (Normally, however, I format for <em>Mac OS Extended (Journaled)</em> file system as it proves a bit better for Mac OS X use on performance.)</p>

<p>Reformat the drive using OSX disk util to FAT32. Remember that you can't have more than 512 files in any one directory under FAT32, and that no file size can be bigger than 4 gig. You don't need any special program, just plug the drive in an go.</p>

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