Transfering data from old Macbook to my PC

[Daniel Hart]

I have an old macbook which has a number of things wrong with it right now, but I'd like t at least get my data off of if. So my question is can I just connect the old drive to my PC via sata and use it, or do I need to clone the drive or something along those lines?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Daniel Hart.

Usually there wouldn't be a problem for you to switch hard drives from different computers, but if you do that with a MacBook's drive and connect it to a Windows computer, it won't be accessible, because of Mac OS X's file system (HFS+), which is not supported by Windows. From what you've written I gather that the MacBook doesn't work anymore, so your other options are to download a 3rd party driver for Windows, which allows it to read HFS+ file system and see if the drive can be accessed when you connect it to the computer. Or transfer the data to another Mac computer, reformat the drive to the exFAT file system(which is supported by both Mac OS X and Windows), transfer the data back to the HDD and then connect it to a Windows computer to back it up.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[fzabkar]

HFSExplorer:
http://www.catacombae.org/hfsx.html

Paragon HFS+ for Windows:
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

MacDrive:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive

Windows Driver to Allow Seagate "For Mac" Drives to Work on Windows (HFS4Win.exe):
http://support.seagate.com/crossplatform/

 

[Daniel Hart]

thanks for the good explanation boogie