Accesing PC Hard Drive with a mac

[Ra552]

:eek:
I'm hoping someone can help me with this...

One of the pins in the cable that connects my monitor to my cpu broke off inside the female connector in the back of the cpu. Hence, I can't connect a monitor to my cpu anymore. Here's the problem - I want to retrieve some files from the pc but I can't anymore. Any suggestions? I have a powerbook G4 and thought about connecting the two with a firewire but I'm not sure what to do from here? Will this work. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[yellow]

My suggestion:

Pull the HD out of the PC and put it in a 3rd party external hard drive case. I suggest one that has both USB2.0 AND firewire. Then you can plug it into another PC, or your Mac. The problem is, if the drive is NTFS (which it probably is), your Mac cannot write to the drive, only read from it.

Your other option?

Buy a new video card and (or borrow a) monitor.

[urmyt0y]

I pulled the HD out of the PC and and placed it in a Rocketfish external hard drive case, but my mac wont read it. I have a macbook pro with OS X. how can i fix this?

[jordan0420]

get a linux live cd and boot it to your computer then use a second external hard drive to transfer from one hd to another (simplest but also probably not the best solution)

[sDJh]

@jordan: That should definately work, but you have to prepare your mac to boot linux (http://refit.sourceforge.net/).

@urmyt0y: What filesystem have you used under windows? NTFS should work actually (read-only). But with a 3rd-party plugin you can fully access NTFS.
Why don't you just ask a friend to copy the stuff on a new HD?

[dioioib]

If the drive is not a mac readable format try these tools out.

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2010/10/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac-201010.html

or if you want to pay,

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

some of these options do give you read and write access to the disk.