External Hard drive / Macs/ PCs?

[Toddgabweg]

I have an ibook G4 that was given to me by my school... this summer we must give them back and we are getting new Vista based laptops... I bought an external hardrive to back up my iphotos and itunes etc. It works great for my ibook, but I could never get a windows based pc to read the content of the hard drive??? I am waiting patiently for a new update for the 24in imac... I hope the imac will have no problems reading my external hard drive...
Should a pc be able to see what I have on my hard drive? I have a Western Digitial 160 gb USB hard drive... it would be nice to transfer my itunes to my new laptop and to my new imac...
Thank you

 

[matticus008]

If you set it up as an HFS+ volume (default in OS X), your PC will not be able to access the hard drive. You can buy a program called MacDrive which will do it, but it will cost you around $70. Alternatively, you can reformat it as FAT32 with Disk Utility or use a boot CD to make it NTFS for Windows.

If you go that route, you will have to move all your files off the drive first, because they will be erased. After the drive is formatted, you can put the files back.