I'm working on a fairly complicated book project at the moment, and have just been given portable USB drive which may or may not contain some of the photos I need.

I was going to plug it into my Mac, but then I recall reading about using certain removable media with Mac OS that subsequently renders them unreadable by Windows machines.

AFAIK this drive (Maxtor Basics Portable Storage 250GB) has only ever been used with a single Windows machine (either XP or 7) and if it worked out of the box will have been used as it came, and never have been reformatted.

I don't want to give this drive back to the owner only for them to find they can no longer access the data on it.

Is it safe to just plug into my Mac or are there any precautions I should take first. Is it worth finding a Windows machine to make a backup of it before proceeding further?

Could you clone with a windows machine it just to be sure, and then copy the files to the mac? I have never used a windows formatted external drive for data so cannot comment about the impact on how it alters the drive.

Only if it's been formatted as NTFS on the Windows PC - then it will read-only on the Mac. You won't be able to write to it but you can drag files off it onto your Mac to edit them.

If it's formatted as FAT - which most new drives seem to be these days - then you can read and write to it on your Mac.

Neither NTFS or FAT formats won't make any difference to the files on there or the drive itself. If you do want to enable writing to NTFS drives, you can buy 3rd party software such as 'Paragon NTFS for Mac' to install on your Mac to enable it. Again, none of this should affect the data on there at the moment.

It'll be formatted as whatever it came out of the box when bought as the owner isn't tech-savvy enough to do anything else. I'm guessing that's going to be FAT?

All I want to do is copy the contents of this drive onto my Mac so I can look through the thousands of photos on there to find the ones I need for this project at my leisure. I don't need to write anything to this drive at all.

So it's going to be alright to just plug it in and get on with the copying?

Should be fine.

Given the size of the drive it's most likely a variant of FAT called ExFAT. Still should be readable on the Mac though.


Provided you remember to eject it before you pull it out, it should be fine. If you just want to copy the whole drive to a folder, you can do so without having to open it. When the icon appears on the desktop, hold down 'alt' and drag it, and you should see a small green '+' on it. Where ever you drop it, the system will then copy all the files into a folder with the same name as the drive.

Jon

Thanks for the advice.

It seems to have gone OK (although I won't know until I give the drive back and hear from the owner). I was able to copy the files I wanted. For some reason it wouldn't show up on the desktop even if the appropriate boxes checked in the Finder preferences, but did show up in the Finder widow sidebars, so because of this I wasn't able to simply drag and copy the whole drive, but had to open it and copy the contents...