question about hard drives

If I converted an internal hard drive from a PC into an external, would it work as an external for a Mac? I know that some PC programs are Mac compatible, and I was wondering if the same could be said for a hard drive that was once an internal for a Windows-running PC.

 

Probably not. The Windows HD is probably formatted as an NTFS volume (or FAT32), and as far as I know, Mac's do not recognize NTFS volumes. If you de-partitoned the drive first (via fdisk for example), and hooked it up to the Mac, and then formatted it from the Mac, it would then probably work. You would, however, lose all the data on the drive. But that shouldn't be an issue 'cuz none of the data would work on the Mac anyway (probably).

hopperdave2000

 

Hard drives are not OS specific, just the file system used. Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther” has read-only support for NTFS. There are ways to get read/write access to NTFS volumes on a Mac, like this or others.