Using the same external hard drive with PC and MAC.?

Question

I just joined the apple club by getting a macbook. Before this I had been a PC user. I have an external hard drive for my PC that has a valuable set of files and folder saved in it.

Basically I would like to use the same external hard drive as a backup drive for my new Mac without losing the files and folders that I have saved in the external from my PC. Is this possible?

When I hooked up my external to the macbook it was detected but a message popped up telling me that the external needs to be formatted and if I proceed to do that I will lose all data currently on the external. I don't want to do that. Is there any way other than transferring all the files to another hard drive and then assigning this one to the mac? I don't have another hard drive with big enough space and really don't want to buy one because the one I have is appr. 400 gigs. Please help I'm new to mac.

Thanks,

Jay

Answer 1

r u using leopard? u will need to attach an empty drive though if u want to use time machine.

Answer 2

I use a standard NTFS external drive on both my mac and pc so it can be done easily.  However, in your situation, your are limited because you don't wish to purchase another drive so....  Connect the drive back to the pc and offload the files there if you can. Use a buddies pc as well until you get all the files off. Put the drive back on your pc and then format it using Fat32 or NTFS. Copy the data back on to the drive and your mac will be able to read and write to it.