Help Installing new External Hard Drive

L

leiferick2000

Registered
Fellas,

Excuse my lack of skills on a mac. I need some help copying data off an external hard drive to a new external hard drive. I am a Windows user and I have a client who has 37 Gigs of data on an external hard drive. He has an powerbook running OS X. I ordered and installed a Mator 300GB External Firewire\USB to his powerbook. I've plugged in the drive to his laptop and it finds the drive. I am able to create files and save to the new drive. It seems to be working right? Is that all there is to it? Do I need to format the drive? Is there a disk utility that I need to run to format it? Reason I ask, When I try and copy files off the Mac to the new drive it copies and moves files until it comes to some files that have some characters in the file name, such as ( " / '%) and all those symbols. I know windows does not allow those in the file name. These files were created on the Mac, how come it won't allow me to copy and paste ALL the files to the new drive. Thanks for your help!
 
Your new external drive is formatted as a PC volume, probably fat32.
So it is subject to the file-naming restrictions of Windows.
The Mac will use this drive just fine as is, but you will continue to struggle with file names.
If it will only be used on Macs, then open the Disk Utility, which is located in Applications/Utilities folder. Click on the external drive in the left-hand list, then click on the Erase tab. You can name the volume whatever you like. Click on the Volume format to change to Mac OS Extended. You could choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but this is not important for a volume that would not be used as a startup volume. Then click the Erase button, wait until done, just a few seconds, and you have a new Mac formatted volume ready to use!
Keep in mind that any data that you have already copied to this drive will be lost after the reformat.
 
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