Os X Can Read Windows Hard Drives?

B

boysimple

Some guy
I'm moving from Windows to OS X, and loving every second of it. My only drawback (i thought) was that I'd have to reburn my mp3's from all of my CD's (4000+ songs). but when I attached the Hd I had in my Pc to my Apple and booted up - it seemed to work just fine (PC drive was partitioned in Fat 32). but as I was browsing the drive finder seemed to get a lil funky.

My question is - should I format this drive to be HFS (which I'm thinking of doing to add a swap partition), or will I continue to operate properly with a Fat 32 drive? I haven't used the drive extensively yet - but would like to know if anyone has any input on this.

E
 
Mac has been able to read PC formated floppies since 8.1 and PC formated hard drives/ZIPs since 8.5. If you are planning on using that drive exclusively for Mac, then reformat it. One of the major draw backs to using a PC formated drive on the mac is that the mac is unable to repair disk issues (ScanDisk) and the mac is harder on the FAT32 directory structure than PCs are.

As far as a swap partition goes, even though OSX is UNIX based, it does not use a SWAP partition like UNIX. It uses Virtual Memory instead. If you look in the past threads you can get a lot of information about how to change the VM file to another drive, and to change the size of the VM page file. Many users have noticed a good increase in speed especially on low memory systems in having the VM on a seperate physical hard drive than the system drive.

If you have the space, you can copy all of your MP3's but it would be better to back them up on CD anyway.
 
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