External Hard Drive buying problems

In our house we have an iMac running leopard 10.5.2. also we have a pc running microsoft windows xp. We also have a wireless-G home network. i would like to buy a hard drive (preferably a networked-but dont want to spend more than $250-$300(the cheaper the better), but if i have to i wouldn't have a problem with a non networked external HD-if i can have the pc and mac hooked up at the same time. (would be using this for mostly music.)

Every hard drive i have found only says it is compatible with xp and mac osX. But i know that some storage devices require you to reformat the hard drive in order to use on a different OS(and when you reformat them it erases all of the data).

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!!!

scienide09 said:

Partition the hard drive so that part of it is OS X extended journaled (HFS+), which will be for the Mac side.
The other partition will be NTFS, for the Windows side.

If you want to be able to read/write from/to the drive from both OS X and from WinXP, make a partition with the FAT32 filesystem instead.

Click to expand...

How do i partition it with the FAT32 filesystem? does that just mean format it? how hard is this to do?