Getting a windows external hard drive to work with mac

[rchip]

Hello guys, I'd appreciate your help so I don't need to buy a new external hard drive!

I have a Goflex 500gb external hard drive that I used with my old Windows PC, it has about 100gb of data that I want to keep from my windows PC, just videos, music, documents etc.

I want to install Mountain Lion on my Macbook Air 2011, however, I want to make a backup of my data on my mac before hand incase it goes wrong. OSX wont let me use this hard drive at the moment, I think because it's formatted for Windows?

I'm not the greatest with computers, I've not used any kind of cloud storage services as of yet.

Can anyone think of a solution, how I could still keep this data that I have on my hard drive and still back up my mac using Time Machine with this hard drive?

Money is a bit tight at the moment so I could do without buying another external hard drive, although it is something I'd like to do down the road for extra security!

Thanks a lot.

 

[miles01110]

You could use NTFS-3G or Macfuse to read it on the Mac. I don't know if either of those have been updated for ML, but I'm also not sure if you're using ML.

 

[rchip]

Thanks for response! Sorry should have made that more clear, I'm running Lion at the moment and I'm going to upgrade to Mountain Lion but I want to backup my data before hand. I will check out those programs you mentioned now!

 

[rchip]

Thank you, I've just downloaded NFTS and it looks like it's just what I need!

 

[rchip]

It's working in the sense I can now transfer files over from my mac to this hard drive, but it wont work with time machine saying the drive is the incorrect format. Oh well, at least I can manually back it up now though so thanks very much for your help. Unless anyone has a way I could get it work with time machine?

Edit

Oh! From reading online, it seems I could partition the hard drive into a windows part and a mac part? Is this possible?