hi all! brand new mac owner with a few newb questions

[newports01]

so after many many years of using pc's i have purchased my first imac... (2011 21.5 inch 2.7ghz). since i figured i will be using this one as long as i possibly could i opted for the faster unit. anyways i have a couple questions. these may seem ignorant to most mac users but ill take that now i am under the impression that external hardrives have to be formated differently for a mac than a pc am i correct? and for this to happen i will need to wipe the drive? this of course is not what i want to do since all of my media is on a 1tb hardrive formally connected to my old PC. so my main question is: since i have already installed bootcamp windows 7(i know typical first timer) i was wondering if i could boot into windows, attach the the hardrive and move everything that i needed to keep over before i wipe and format for mac. can i do this? also can i write to my mac partition while on my bootcamp windows partition? if so this would be a breeze to select what i need to keep and what i dont. thank you so much for your feedback!

[iOSTom]

A little handy application you might be able to utilize is called 'Wine' or 'Wine Boxer' basically it turns windows app's into mac app's. You may find some use for it, otherwise I can't really help you since I've never used an EHD.

[newports01]

A little handy application you might be able to utilize is called 'Wine' or 'Wine Boxer' basically it turns windows app's into mac app's. You may find some use for it, otherwise I can't really help you since I've never used an EHD.

thanks i will look into that.. but im not to worried about my apps, more or less my 200 gig cd collection and 500 gig movies collection

[iOSTom]

I'm pretty sure that if your music is in a .MP3 format, and your movies in a recognised mac format, it shouldn't be a problem? Since movie and music files are pretty universal.

[newports01]

I'm pretty sure that if your music is in a .MP3 format, and your movies in a recognised mac format, it shouldn't be a problem? Since movie and music files are pretty universal.

true, but its the hardrive format that im worried about. i will wipe it and it will be mac only, but i need to figure out how to either format it or move files over, then format and move back

[MightyGem]

Your hard drive will be formatted as FAT or NTFS. Macs can read both, but to write to NTFS requires some extra software.

Have you tried plugging your drive into your Mac yet?

[newports01]

Your hard drive will be formatted as FAT or NTFS. Macs can read both, but to write to NTFS requires some extra software.

Have you tried plugging your drive into your Mac yet?

just did, thanks for the input. copying all the files i needed to keep to the mac hardrive and then gonna format. i was scared to plug it up and mess up the format of the drive, but i see thats not the case. MAC is starting to grow on me

[chas_m]

Just remember, "Mac" is not an acronym, so there's no need to capitalise it.

[newports01]

uhm. thanks for pointing that out i guess