regarding external harddrive

whoo hoo! my g50v-a1 has arrived today!~
but i have a small problem.. (sorry i posted this under harddrive section, but decided to post this again under ASUS, apologies if that goes against double posting rule but i just wanted to ask the ASUS friends also)

i've been using my external 500gig seagate harddrive for about 1 year and have all my information and pictures, music and what not in it, but i just received my asus g50 and when i plug it in it says i need to reformat the drive before it can read any of the information, but that will erase all the info. is there anything i can do? is there anyway to get the information back or to make it work without formatting? i have about 350g with of stuff that i cannot afford to lose.

- _jungi

 

Did you use USB connection?

 

yeah on mac i used the firewire or w/e , and for this new laptop since it didnt have that i used usb to hook it up.

 

I'm not good with Mac OS -have had last encounter 4 years ago (OS 9.6).
May be it is possible to connect your external HD back to your Mac and to transform your stuff the way it will be compatible with Windows? Normally it does not matter with flash drives but with hard drives it could be a problem. I hope somebody else can give you better edvice

 

If worse comes to worst you could drive burning all your data on DVD or copying them on to a USB thumb drive.

 

We run a mixed household here. Windows CANNOT read any drive formatted for Mac OSX (MFS or otherwise), although OSX can read (but not write to) a NTFS formatted Windows HDD.

I'm sorry.... you have no effective option but to burn the external HDD data onto some sort of portable source (DVD, USB flash drive, etc), then after reformatting your external HDD you can copy the files from your portable media over to the HDD once again through the G50. The (much more complicated) alternative would be to network the two notebooks wirelessly, set up access on the G50 to the MBP's hard drive, and then cross load everything. Not an approach I would recommend, and I can't walk you through that, although you can probably find some tutorials online through google perhaps.

 

that sounds lovely i wouldnt object to burning them on dvd at all but the problem is how do i burn the data on the to dvds when i cant access the files at all?

 

You can burn DVDs on you Mac Book, can't you?

 

A friend of mine uses macdrive software by mediafour more info here

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

 

yeah macdrive is the way to go when I had to recover some info from my friend's mac-formatted external

 

Just a side note, if the MacDrive tool doesn't work, you may actually be better off using a large flash device (8GB or more) like a thumbdrive, or an SD card, rather than burning stuff on DVDs. A bit faster to copy the files, the "chunks" in which you copy the data are larger which means fewer trips between the two notebooks, and also you don't end up with a bunch of useless DVDs later on (unless you keep them for backup, in which case they are not useless).

An even better alternative would be to connect the two devices using a crossed network cable, setup the IP config in a compatible fashion, turn off the firewall on the Windows machine and connect to it using an Admin share (\\IPOFTHEMACHINE\d$ for instance). Then you can copy at Gbit speeds. I have never done this Mac->Windows, just Windows->Windows, so I'm not sure it'd work.

 

i am so frustrated... sigh i know how to do none of those lol. and mac tool didnt work i tried it but it only listed about 50 items. whereas i have 350g of data in it.

 

Can you network them together and file share? There are free ftp servers that run under windows. If there's one that runs on Mac, it should be workable... This one's cool in windows.... http://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=server

 

I really suggest one of these two options. If the MAC machine can connect to Windows shares, then the former is easier; otherwise, the latter is easier. What points in this procedure are you unclear on? So that we can help.

 

I just realized you have XP running on your MacBook. Do you use virtual PC on your Mac in order to run XP?

 

A good idea, but the external HDD is still formatted as MacOS; I don't think this would solve the problems XP has reading the OSX formatted partition even if it simplified networking, and Som admits above to having limited tech knowledge.


@Som -- here's how to get it done, if you can't accomplish EBE's cross network suggestion (which I agree with his caution about being unsure whether it would work due to OSX/XP format read issues):
1. connect your external HDD (eHDD) to the MBP.
2. start to copy files from the eHDD to either DVDs or USB flash drive, until the dvd or usb is full.
3. take the now full dvd or usb and put it in the G50. Download the files to the G50's hdd.
4. repeat steps 2 & 3 until all files from the eHDD are on the G50.
5. connect the eHDD to the G50, and format it as NTFS.
6. copy all the files that you moved from the MBP onto the G50 over to the newly formatted eHDD.
7. All done - now you have reconstructed your eHDD for access from the G50, with all the files from your MBP that you wanted.

This process is going to take a *long* while (with 350GB of data to move from the eHDD, as you're doing this piece by piece). But in the end you'll have what you desire, everything now read accessible from both the G50 and the MBP (although the latter won't be able to write to it).

 

did i mention i love this website, the community is just very helpful and active. thank you to everyone who has helped, much appreciated.

clearskies ty again, im going to try that list tomorrow night when i have time, if i run into problems ill post here. for now let me try that.
@oldman *edit*
no i used bootcamp, but they have expired it, requiring you to get leopard osx, so now it's only running tiger osx w/out windows xp.

-_jungi