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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Hard Drive for Time Machine

garthunkle - Jan 13, 2008 - 3:35 pm

Hi there,

I recently bought an iMac after my PC completely crashed. I have important documents on the old hard drives I want to get hold of.

Am I right in saying that I will be able to buy a SATA external caddy, and hook that up to my windows based Laptop to extract the files? Or do I need to format the drive first?

Secondly, after i have got all the files I want from the drive I intend to format it and use it as a Time Machine Drive. Question is, will the 200GB drive work for use on a 500GB iMac, bearing in mind I have only used 87Gb so far?

Cheers,

Gareth

Serenak - Jan 15, 2008 - 8:42 pm

Hello Gareth

thanks for choosing to use macosx.com and I will try to advise you

First things first.. you want stuff off the HDDs of the old PC - yes get an external case that is suitable for use with the old drives... make sure that you get the right one... if the old PC had SATA drives then yes get a SATA enclosure... if it had the older IDE/ATA (now often confusingly, to me at least, called PATA) get one of those... what external connection is up to you USB 2.0 is usually cheaper but FW is usually faster..

If it is a Laptop make sure to get a case that is designed for 2.5" drives or has the adapators for one or you will be wasting your time and money.

Unless I am very mistaken the Mac will be quite happy to mount and read FAT or NTFS drives... but IIRC it cannot write to NTFS "out of the box" so if your drive is NTFS you may have to reformat it after recovering any data you want if you would like to use it as an external disk for the Mac. Once the HDD(s) are in the external casing they should be able to be attached to a PC or a Mac, laptop or otherwise as long as the case has suitable output plugs (best look for one that has at least USB 2 and FW 400

Under no circumstances should you attempt to do ANYTHING to the old drives until you have retrieved your data/mp3s/word docs/whatever... and certainly /do not/ format it - or everything will be DESTROYED

Once you have recovered your data feel free to reformat the drive.. HFS+ (Apple Extended) will be best for Mac but if you wish to share the drive with a PC FAT 32 is the best bet.

You could use the drive as a Time Machine HD but there is one thing that make it unwise - it is smaller than the internal HDD of the Mac, whilst you may have less than the 200GB on there now take it from me you will probably soon over top that..

This is what I would do... though you can make up your own mind. Get a suitable external case and put the HDD into it - recover the data, either to the Laptop or the Mac, whatever is easier (both if you like.. you can trash one set later if need be).

Reformat as HFS+ if you want it for Mac only, NTFS for the Windows Laptop or FAT 32 for both whatever suits you... (myself I would make it a suitable backup drive for the Win Laptop and use FAT 32 to make it usable by the Mac if needed)

You don't say if the old PC is recoverable... you could quite easily turn that into a network shared storage server BTW with some big cheap drives and a bit of network fiddling...

For Time Machine.. look into a cheap big disk to attach to the Mac.. .or check out the new Time Capsule announced today at MWSF... go to Apple.com for more on that...

hope that helps, come back if you need more advice or clarifications