External Hard Drive

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I'm fairly new with the Mac and with an external hard drive. Please bare with me:
I have a MacBook Air with a 60 gig hard drive, OS 10.6.2 installed, Parallels Desktop w/ Win Xp installed and a Seagate 500 gig external hardrive formated in MS-Dos (Fat32). I should say that when I bought the hard drive, it didn't work with my Mac until I brought it to a Mac Store and they re-formatted it for me. When I plug it in, my Mac sees it, and when I open it, I see a couple of files in the main window and my Mac stuff in the side panel. Now here's my problem: I don't know how to use this drive. When the drive was re-formatted, all information on and about the drive was lost. I do want to use the drive to save photos and music and would also like to be able to install certain programs on it, both in Windows and Mac. I'm sorry this is so long. If anyone sees their way to help, I'd appreciate it.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2GHz Mac Mini 2GB RAM 160GB 10.6.2 | MDD DP 1.25GHz G4 1.5GB RAM 10.4.11 | 233MHz iMac G3 10.3.9
You should be able to use it like any other internal drive when attached. Just set the external as the destination.

Note: some programs require installs on the boot drive (the one with OSX on it).
Also FAT32 format has a single file size limit of 4GB.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2GHz Mac Mini 2GB RAM 160GB 10.6.2 | MDD DP 1.25GHz G4 1.5GB RAM 10.4.11 | 233MHz iMac G3 10.3.9
its a toss-up:

NTFS is fine but read-only on OSX - you'd have to add stuff using XP

HFS+ (Mac format) is incompatible with Windows.

FAT32 is the best option for compatibility right now, just with some caveats.
 
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Thanks again d e m. One more question. Can I take folders out of the Mac drive and drop into the external drive?? Thanks?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2GHz Mac Mini 2GB RAM 160GB 10.6.2 | MDD DP 1.25GHz G4 1.5GB RAM 10.4.11 | 233MHz iMac G3 10.3.9
Sure can - you can drag and drop from either Mac OS or XP onto the external drive. You're welcome? :p
 

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