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Transferring Data from Inspiron 1720 to MacBook Air?
I have an old Dell Inspiron 1720 and I want to to transfer some documents on it to my MacBook Air. I am unsure how to do that. I bought a memory stick but I don't think it was compatible with my Dell. I went to Drop Box on my Dell and since it has Windows Vista, I couldn't put those documents in Drop Box because Windows Vista is too outdated. Any ideas on what I can do? I would appreciate all suggestions.
ejn63
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10 Elder
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May 18th, 2020 13:00
Most flash drives come formatted as FAT32 and can be read and written by either PC or Mac. That's the easiest way - copy the files from the old PC to the flash drive, and unmount and copy to the Mac.
If the drive isn't formatted as FAT32, you can easily redo the formatting:
https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/format-usb-flash-drive-to-fat32.html
jphughan
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May 18th, 2020 14:00
@jellyroller The only suggested change I would make to @ejn63 's advice is to format your flash drive as exFAT instead of FAT32. It's supported on Vista as of SP1, and the major advantage over FAT32 is that it supports file sizes larger than 4GB, which FAT32 doesn't. NTFS also supports that, but NTFS volumes to my knowledge are read-only on macOS systems -- but exFAT volumes are read/write. Windows also doesn't allow formatting volumes larger than 32GB as FAT32. There are certainly third-party utilities that will be happy to that, but again exFAT is a better fit for your case.
Any USB flash drive you buy should work just fine on both Vista and your MacBook though. I'm not sure why yours wouldn't have been compatible.
yuanyasmine
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June 4th, 2020 01:00
It seems that the memory card is formatted in NTFS. Mac can read the NTFS drives but cannot write to the one. That means you can't save or copy any files from the memory card to your MacBook Air. To use the drive on Mac:
1. Format the memory card to exFAT or FAT32. Be sure to back up data from the memory card before do this. You can erase the drive on both Mac or Windows: https://iboysoft.com/ntfs-for-mac/how-to-format-external-hard-drive-for-mac-and-pc.html
2. If you don't want to format the memory card, you can go with a third-party app, such as Mounty, Paragon NTFS, iBoysoft NTFS for Mac.