I need a way to access my pc formatted hard drive which has important backups of my work I recorded in Studio One while I was on PC. My Dell is dead now and all I have is an external hard drive with backups on it. I really need to access the files on that drive.
I remember back in the 90s using my Mac Power PC 9600 MacOS 9.1 was able to read pc formatted disc. Not today in Big Sur.
So can someone please direct me to the best alternatives for both free and paid?

Thanx in Advance
-BiG Pluck

 

Try NTFS for mac https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

 

That's for writing to a NTFS formatted disk. MacOS reads NTFS out of the box.
So you could copy a file on a NTFS drive over to a MacOS formatted one.

 

Thanx 6ix I'll go check it out right now.

-BiG Pluck

 

Thanx for the info Boom

-BiG Pluck

 

Now I learned I can't even mount the drive. And the Mac Utility Disc app can't repair the drive.
Can you guys suggest something to repair the drive with?

 

If you have a spare USB Thumb Drive or SD Card, you could try a live Linux utility distro like MX-21.1 respin “Workbench”.
There is the old standby Hiren's BootCD that also comes as a bootable USB iamge.

Depending on how your system died, some or all DATA could be damaged/lost. Hope for the best but, be ready for an unexpected result.

Also a reminder. If you are no tech savvy, read through & understand documentation for the chosen tool(s) before proceeding. This should eliminate potential user caused recovery errors.

 

Try a recovery on Mac with software that works with NTFS formatted disks - like Stellar Data Recovery or Disk Drill.
Important: don't write to that disk. Recovery software usually creates a copy of a damaged disk, so you need another disk with the same size.

Check your pm..

 

I think the initial responses are a bit "polyanna" and this will be a rabbit hole. There are too many details left out. What was the "backup" created with; is it an image like Time Machine creates? What make/model/capacity drive? Have you used terminal to check which drives are even installed, mounted or not? in terminal do diskutil list

What failed on the PC? Is another available to you to use for this? because that would obviously be the easiest way.

 

If you have a drive with windows installed you can use the paragon software, but if you want to access backups maybe better to install something like ParallelsDesktop or any VM will do it.

Didnt get that "polyanna" thing, too advanced for me dont even know what that means. Not a rabbit hole, if you have a working win drive just use NTFS for mac to access files, if you have backups probably better to install a VM from scratch to access those backup files.

 

Last edited: Jun 2, 2022

Rose Colored Lens? I mean that the replies are hopeful of a good situation. but ignoring the ugly underlying details of it.