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External hard drive Mac to PC

329 Views 3 Replies 2 Participants Last post by  lochlomonder
Hello,
I am switching from Mac over to PC. I have an external hard drive which holds all of my DVDs that I have ripped over the years. Will I be able to watch them on this new PC? Do I have to do some sort of reformatting?
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Welcome to the forum, @Sk8masta88.

As in many things, the answer is: it depends. If your external drive was formatted using exFAT, then you'll be fine; Windows will be able to read the drive easily. However, if the drive was formatted using HFS+ then it's going to require work, since Windows cannot read this format.

Paragon offers HFS+ for Windows if your drive is in that format. You just install it on the Windows machine and it'll be able to read & write to the drive. Alternatively, you could copy the contents of the drive to your Mac, presupposing you have enough disk space, format the drive using exFAT, and then copy the contents back again.
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Thank you very much! I'm lucky to have two Macs so I will copy off of them and then reformat hard drive to work between the two systems.
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