using my hard drive with my mac

Hi,
I got a mac a while ago and everything is fine except that I recently found an old hard drive of mine which has lots of photos and other files on it which I would REALLY like to be able to transfer to my mac. However, when I plug it into my mac it doesn't recognise the hard drive whatsoever. From what I understand (which is quite little), the hard drive (which is a 40gb firelite I think... I got the case changed so I'm not sure exactly what its called) is formatted in ntfs and so it won't work with my mac, am I right? So if this is the case, is there any way I can get my mac to recognise the format so that I can at least view the files? If that's not possible, would I be able to transfer the files by plugging it into a pc, taking the files off the hard drive, reformatting the hardrive into fat32, moving the files back on and then plugging it into my mac?
Also, it works with only SOME windows PCs because I tested it on one PC in shop and it worked fine, and then I tried it in another PC at my university and it didn't work! What's that about? Could there be another problem with it as well? It had issues before, as I said, I had to get the casing changed because it wasn't getting enough power from the PC....
anyway, I have a lot of sentimental value attached to the contents of the hard drive so if anyone could help me that would be greeeat! Thank you

 

yes I can here it spin actually... and it lights up... hmm my mac is OS X 10.6.2. It's a macbook I think..? like not mac book pro, just a regular mac... I use USB and its a 2.5''....