Western Digital My Book for Mac

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if i'm switching from windows to mac, can I use this hard drive to transfer my music files to my mac?

I have about 4GB of music on my desktop and it's a Windows XP. I'm getting a Macbook soon, will I be able to use this hard drive to transfer the music over?

  • Asked by Kevin R from Granite City
  • Nov 17, 2009

2 Answers from the Community

  • Best Answer

    it says it comes "formatted for Mac," so you might not be able to read or write to it in Windows unless you reformat it. There's a Mac-specific disk format (called HFS+), a Windows-specific disk format * (called NTFS), and a lowest-common-denominator format called FAT32. So, "formatted for Mac" might mean it's HFS+. Either your Windows computer or your Mac can reformat it as FAT32, then you can read and write from both computers.

    * that's kind of oversimplified; there's products that will allow you to read and write NTFS on a Mac, but it can't out of the box.

    • Answered by Matt H from Reston
    • Dec 17, 2009

  • yes,you could but they might not be the same file on a mac unless you downloaded it on iTunes

    • Answered by Riley N from Monrovia
    • Nov 30, 2009