Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

138 switching to the mac: the missing manual

• A CD or DVD. If your Windows PC has a CD or DVD burner, here’s another

convenient method. Burn a disc in Windows, eject it, and then pop it into the Mac

(see Figure 5-1). As a bonus, you wind up with a backup of your data on the disc

itself.

Note: If you’re given a choice of file format when you burn the disc in Windows, choose ISO9660. That’s

the standard format that the Macintosh can read.

• Move the hard drive itself. This is a grisly, very technical maneuver best under-

taken by serious wireheads—but it can work. You can install your PC’s hard drive

directly into a Power Mac, as long as it was prepared using the older FAT or FAT32

formatting scheme. (The Mac can handle FAT hard drives just fine, but chokes

with NTFS hard drives.)

When you insert a Windows-formatted disk, whatever the type, its icon appears at the

upper-right corner of your desktop, where Mac disks like to hang out. (If it doesn’t

appear, you or someone you love has probably fiddled with the “Show these items on

the Desktop” settings in the FinderÆPreferencesÆGeneral tab.)

Transfers by Network

Here’s one of the best features of Mac OS X: It can “see” shared disks and folders on

Windows PCs that are on the same network. Seated at the Mac, you can open or copy

files from a PC. In fact, you can go in the other direction, too: Your old PC can see

shared folders on your Mac. ...