Urgent Help Needed!

[GAM]

Good Morning All,

I have been using a MacBook Pro for many years, yet it has become slower and slower over the last 12 months, even getting to start is a pain... so I bought a Elements 4T hard drive to back it up, which I have done, yet I am now using a HP laptop, and it doesn't recognise the hard drive in finder I didn't appreciate the different format! can anyone suggest how to see the hard drive?

 

[Dry Rot]

There's a Mac Users group on Facebook, not run by Apple, that seems quite helpful. I wish I'd never bought one!

 

[GAM]

There's a Mac Users group on Facebook, not run by Apple, that seems quite helpful. I wish I'd never bought one!

Thank You, the worst laptop I have bought!

 

[rollestonpark]

If the external drive is using some kind of special format that isn't supported under windows... (which seems unusual to me), then

This is a bit techy I'm afraid:
I'd create a Linux Mint USB bootable stick, boot the new laptop off the USB stick into Linux, then connect the drive to the laptop and copy the data to the windows partition on to the internal hard drive.
Then reboot, removing the USB stick and external drive and allow to boot back into windoze.

If that's too hard, find someone with a MAC and use their machine to copy off the data, reformat the drive to a windows compatible format, like NTFS or maybe FAT32, then copy the data back to it.

 

[Dry Rot]

I have a brand new external drive here that my 2019 iMac says is unreadable. (Yes, it's been correctly formatted). I have so many passwords, both I and the various Apple techs I have spoken to (in USA, Lithuania, Portugal, etc.!) do not understand...! I bought another 2019 iMac so I could read stuff that's on my'other' 2019 iMac (the one with all the passwords). There's more (of course, it's a Mac).

Macs put me in mind of some new invention that reallly takes off. So the inventer tries to improve it a bit more. Then he improves more. And so on until it is so "improved" that it doesn't actually work any more unless operated by the original inventer. When all we, the using public, actually want is something that actually works without a lot of hassle! We don't want or need all the fancy stuff! JUST SOMETHING THAT WORKS!

 

[dave6470]

Apple are a bunch of controlling bar steward
everything is locked down to make it hard for you to change from there ecosystem

 

[Feynman]

When you format the external drive on the Mac you need to ensure it is in ExFat rather than AFPS. AFPS can only be read by Apple whereas ExFat can work on both systems. Also if the back up was created via Time Machine, Windows will fail to read it.

 

[Dry Rot]

To resurrect this thread.

Fed up with 'not enough space on Time Machine', I bought a 4T Seagate Expansion Drive, made sure it was formatted, and stuck it on. Very temperamental. Changing the USB connection sometimes works. Worth a try. It's electricity! The work of The Devil!