Forums | MacLife

All the USB transfer cable setups that I got on a google search came up with only Windows to Windows software.

This Apple Support article doesn't mention the ability to do it via direct USB connection either.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1408

I'm thinking that Ethernet is the way to go.

sturner wrote:

Or put it on a network drive, or a USB portable drive from the Windows box, and then you've done it. You can transfer to a Mac or just leave it on the external drive.

My concern about using a basic USB portable drive is that the space
I need is high (100gb).

The external drive I have is USB but I don't know if the filesystem format
for the transfer from the Windows machine to the USB drive and then
to the Mac is going to be at all compatible.

How standard is the USB filesystem format? I doubt it would bridge the
divide between Windows and Mac OS X?!?

Your external drive, if it's large enough to keep all data in you PC, is probably NTFS. You mac can read NTFS so there shouldn't be any problem with transferring from your external drive to your mac.

Once you've transfered your files, you can reformat your external drive to Mac format and share your whole drive via SMB (from Sharing preferences pane). You'll need a cross-over ethernet cable, or use a router to network your Mac & PC.

If your external drive isn't big enough then networking them via SMB is the easiest way.

PLEASE NOTE: if you ever encrypted any files using Windows XP NTFS encryption, you want to decrypt them first. Otherwise you'll end up with useless chunks.

Maybe not via a USB cable but Apple provides these solutions using either an Ethernet cable connecting your Windows machines directly to your new Mac, or via your home LAN.