Hard drives and data

If anyone reading this has seen my posts before you know that I store everything on an external 500GB hard drive. After Christmas i will be ordering a base line 13" macbook pro. non retina.

That will be a huge step up from my computer so if you have seen any of my previous posts then thank you for helping me with the RAM ideas but I'll upgrade later when I need to, for now I just need to see how much difference in speed there is.

My question is really about my hard drive. I run ubuntu 10.04, its a long story. so i have everything stored on an external HD. Only because i cannot store anything on my comp. I have been told i will need to install a compatibility layer for ext2 and ext3 drives.

Here is the Q: how can i tell if my hard drive is an EXT2 or EXT3. Can OSX mountain lion read such drives? Also my father has an old PC with windows XP service pack 2 on it and it will read the hard drive just fine, does that mean the drive is formatted for windows? i even get a system volume information file and a trash 1000 file on the drive whenever i go back to my comp.

now I know this seems tedious but if its formatted for windows will it read on OSX? I'm utterly confused and have far to many questions. May I get some help please?

Not a subject for "Community Announcements......". Moved to correct forum. Please read forum descriptions prior to posting.

Windows can not natively read nor write to the Ext2 or Ext3 files systems without the aid of a driver of which there are several. OS X likewise can not natively read nor write to those file systems.

Also, Windows can not read nor write to the HFS file system without a driver. OS X can read from a drive formatted to NTFS but can not write to it without a driver. The only file system compatible between OS X, Windows, and Linux is FAT-32.

Well i can say that the PC doesnt have an internet connection and we have never downloaded any software to it. I know that when i bought the drive i hooked it into my comp (On ubuntu) and it was able to read the files without issue after being used on windows. I never formatted it to a file type when on my computer. So best chance is that its probably a FAT-32 correct? with that being said I will try to move this from Community Announcements i didnt know it was posting to that area.

I've already moved the post for you which can only be done by a Staff member.

The drive is probably formatted to FAT-32 like you said. OS X and Linux both can read and write to FAT-32 but neither OS can be installed on a drive that's formatted that way. And Windows versions from Vista to Windows 8 can only be installed to NTFS although they can read and write to FAT-32.