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I'm going to replace my MacBookPro system drive / hard disk with an SSD. I will then re-install MacOS and Windows via bootcamp.

The original drive will be put in a USB caddy to be used as an external drive.

My system drive has bootcamp on it, so it has been partitioned HFS+ / NTFS

If I plug this drive as an external drive via USB will 2 (two) drives appear on my Mac Desktop? One for the MacOS partition and one for the NTFS partition?

(When I've put a partitioned drive in a USB external caddy and then plugged it into a Windows machine, several drives appear, 1 per partition.)

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3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Yes, you will see a mounted drive for each existing partition on the existing internal drive.

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Thanks I look forward to finding out. If it works out I will upvote and accept your answer. Have you tried this yourself? –  therobyouknow May 27 '13 at 1:40
+1 upvote it works. And accepted because this works and you were first to answer. –  therobyouknow Jun 10 '13 at 6:07

You'll see drives like as it was internally, just with a different icon. You will even be able to boot from the external MacOS (press and hold alt-key when the system chimes on power-up), but this (boot from USB) will not work for Windows.

But the files will be accessible as before.

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Thank you! I hope to try it out and upvote. –  therobyouknow May 27 '13 at 23:26
+1 upvote, yes I found this too. Thanks for the tip on booting from the external drive. I gave @Scot the accepted answer as he answered first. But thank you too and +1 vote for you. –  therobyouknow Jun 10 '13 at 6:04
@therob: thanks, much appreciated –  Nicholaz Jun 10 '13 at 15:41

I did this before and the partitions appear on the desktop like USB pen drives or other drives you plug in. The NTFS drive will be read-only (but this is the same as internally, unless you use an NTFS file system support program that can write to it).

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+1 yes I found this. I use Tuxera NTFS for write access to the NTFS file system (makes it work like any other drive attached, transparent, so much so that you wouldn't know what file system is use) and it works very well - no issues - drag drop delete rename files as usual - behaves the same as mac file system This tool is related to NTFS3G and MacFuse I believe. Cheers. Accepted answer given to @Nick as he came in first with an answer but +1 vote to you for responding. Cheers! –  therobyouknow Jun 10 '13 at 6:06

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