so i have a pc that is crapping out on me. i know this is the mac forum and stuff, just bear with me. the pc is my wife's and she is using it for school. but it keeps crapping out on us. now i have a chance to get my hands on a laptop for her but it doesn't have an HD. it just so happens i have a 2.5 ide hd in my G3, with the adaptor. now i want to put the 2.5 drive into the laptop and then put her old 3.5ide into my G3. i have an idea that the 3.5 will go and transfer, because the 2.5 was originally a pc drive. but i am not sure if the 2.5 will transfer back to a pc drive in the process. plus, the 5500 i had the 2.5drive in first will no longer read 3.5 drives. is this standard for using the 2.5to3.5 adaptor, or was it a freak thing - the 5500 was having problems reading drives before the adaptor.
any help would be greatly appreciated, that is if you could follow the soap opera of my computers.
peace and love
ande
There are many occasions that I have used a hard drive in a mac and then transfered it to a PC. Just make sure you format it in MS-DOS file format, before putting it in the PC again.
Second, there may be a harddrive maximum size on the 5500, make sure that the hard drive in it is lower than the limit. Third, try formating it with Norton Utilities (you can get an older copy off of www.ebay.com for cheap. or try silverlining (i think that is what it is called) from LaCie. (try and find it on ebay.)
Good Luck!!
IDE Drives have identical physical components, regardless for what computer it was destined to be installed in. What makes the difference is the formatting. Your best bet, if possible, is to back up your Mac files, then put the 2.5" drive in the laptop, boot off of a Windows 98 boot floppy, run FDISK to delete the Mac partition and create the partition(s) you need on the laptop, reboot and format the drive, the install Windows (which is what I'm assuming will go on the laptop).
Failing that, if you have access to a Knoppix boot CD, run cfdisk from a terminal window and create whatever kind of partition you need (FAT, FAT16 or FAT32).
As for the 5500, definitely try SilverLining, especially if it is a non-Apple branded drive. Some Mac's just don't like 3rd party drives.
Cheers,
The Czar
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