Look closely in the left hand list of items. You should see memory listed. Once you click on it, the detail view to the right will change.

If for some reason that still is not working, perhaps you could post a screenshot do we can see what is happening?

If not, just choosing “About this Macintosh” will display the current model, speed, and total memory/RAM. You can click on the text in this “About…” window and different data will be shown such as machine serial number.

I would never run anything but HFS+ on a Mac myself. Actually I rarely could, as I rarely have a second drive, and HFS+ is the only format that can boot a Mac.

As to your other issue, you have three options of varying difficulty.

One, reinstall Vista in hopes it works to get your data off.

Two, download a Linux boot CD, which is just a single file you burn to a CD, pop into the windows machine, and it will start up off the CD into Linux. You only need to get basic networking working, as in plug a network cable directly from one computer to another, and you can copy your files. Or, keep it simple and pop in some other drive, thumb drive, external, whatever.

Third option, probably the one I would take if I didn’t have a Linux boot disc on hand that second… Open the case, pop out the drive, attach a firewire case to it, and copy my data right off it. Most people don’t have those multi cable adapter thingies laying around needed to connect up a raw drive though.

Good luck.

This whole migration business has taught me to think laterally and to try to solve the “problems” logically.

My main bug at the moment (and I am going round in circles with it) is the data on my old Vista disc. Vista has corrupted itself and will not allow the network to connect nor see any attached HDDs or EXHDs! I can get to the data and read it but I have no way of getting it off and onto another PC or Mac. Still I have the time, and I will find a way.

Again thanks for that interesting and useful post. No doubt I will be back soon!

You never had to notice, because you had a PC, put the disk in, plugged it in, or stuck it in your camera and it just worked.

On the Mac, things are a little different, and file systems with names like HFS, HFS+ and others are used. However, you still won’t much notice it, as the Mac can understand the format of almost any drive you toss at it. Whether it will read and write to it in a way that you want is a different matter, as you are learning.

What I suspect is happening, is you got your external drive, it came from the factory formatted for a PC, you plugged it in, it appeared to work, and you went on about your day.

The problem is, it is working, however, the Mac is having trouble with the permissions system because the PC formatted drive does not support them. It is having trouble writing to the drive because the format is wrong. And more than likely, file names are being changed and shortened because the drive does not support long file names.

Worse than all this, many people end up in a situation like yours where they have been dutifully backing up to a drive formatted similar, and all seems fine. However, even though the files are on the backup drive, even though they are near identical size, and even though everything appears fine, the files are broken.

The Mac still uses something called resource forks, and now uses heavily something called meta data. Basically additional bits of data about a file you will never see by looking at the file, but an application will use when you read the file. The song name on an mp3 is a type of meta data, you can’t see it anywhere in the file, but it is there. The icon you see on some files is often stored in what is called a resource fork. You can’t edit it, but you certainly see it. When you copy that to a PC formatted drive, the resource fork is stripped, and you have lost the icon, not to mention damaged the file, usually to a point it is not usable.

Simple files like plain text and jpg images are usually safe. Complex files like Word, Excel, Quark, etc are usually not.

All you need to do to solve this is reformat your drive. In your Utilities folder is an application called Disk Utility. Open that, select the drive you have attached, being careful not to select any other drives, and forma the disk as a Mac HFS+ drive.

This will destroy any data on the drive, though that data may already be of no value. If you want to be safe, just copy it off to a safe place in the meantime, reformat, and then copy it back, finally deleting the files from the interim location.

Any new drive you buy should always be reformatted. Memory cards for digital cameras and the like probably should be left alone, or formatted in a specific way according to the manufacturer. I generally leave them alone, or if I am too impatient to wait for an erase of all my images, reformat it in the camera itself, ensuring the formatting is correct.

If you get stuck, as there are a lot of option to Disk Utility, google for “format Mac backup drive” there will be many tutorials to help you along. There are also Apple tech docs and tutorial videos on their Web site that explain how to correctly format a drive for a Mac.

You should still be able to access this drive from a PC with no issues.

The Mac has always been very generous with the file systems it can read, whereas Windows could generally only read one. While it is a great feature I would never want to see go away, it does often confuse, and usually anger new to the Mac converts as they learn their backup efforts were a waste, or worse, their data is lost.

Use Disk Utility to reformat the drive and you should be back in business.

Hope this helps.

You can skip the next 3 paragraphs if you want, but I need to say it!

I am a recent Apple convert, having tasted Apple with my iPad1 which is one of the best and most useful gadgets I have ever owned. I have been a Windows user for 27 years now and finally, finally after having insurmountable problems with Vista bit the bullet and bought an iMac. I love it.

Slowly I am finding my legs on the iMac. I have set up a network using an HP Mediasmart server and upped my old PC to Windows 7 and it is now happily being used as a media centre in our TV room, controlled from my iPad of course. I have in effect succeeded in networking 2 Windows PCs and 2 Macs (iMac and Macbook)

I have solved, the hard way, several problems in migrating from PC to Mac but now I am stuck.

The problems I cannot solve are here. I have iWork and copied my (MS Office) Documents folder to an external hard disk before closing the PC. When I open and change a document a) I cannot save it in the original folder – I want to keep “Documents” on the external HD but if I have to copy the contents of the docs on the External HD so be it.
b) When I try to save it I have a pop up that says “The document “AA DIRECTIONS TO THE VILLA” could not be saved as “AA DIRECTIONS TO THE VILLA”. Read-only file system”
If I write a new document I cannot save it to any folder on the Ex HD
c) So I have just copied the entire DOCUMENTS folder from the ExHD to Documents on the iMac. It seems to have copied the folder but not the contents!

Am I doing it wrong and can anyone point me in the right direction.

Many Thanks

Gary

I have no issue with this, however, troubleshooting these types of things is extremely advanced, and not something we will ever be discussing on this site. Sorry we could not be of more help.

Have you tried repairing permissions?

If you look in /System/Library/PreferencePanes do you see the Displays.prefPane and Mouse.prefPane files? If not, somehow, they have been deleted, and hopefully you can restore them from a backup. If not, you should be able to hopefully find them on your installer DVD.

Those files can be a little hard to extract from an installer DVD, so please let us know what you find out with some of the above tests first.

It should be pretty intuitive.

However, my best advice to you… backup to some other media, and do a clean install. Format and erase the drive, clean install, then copy your user data over. Reinstall your applications from scratch. In the end, those takes some time, let time than you probably have spent in the rabbit hole you are in now