External Hardware work or not..?

Hello, I am new here, so I am not sure if this post if proper for the "section". I hope it is ^_^
Well, I heard that when you start using an external hard drive on a microsoft and then plug the hard drive in the mac after using it in the microsoft, the external hard drive has the tendency to get damaged because of the different systems...
I am not sure if this is true, that is why I came here to ask...
I am scared of trying because my microsoft damaged so I cannot empty the hard drive in case something happens after I plug it in the mac, and lose all the data.
I hope someone can help me out ^_^

By "a microsoft" I'm assuming you mean "a PC running Windows."

You have heard incorrectly.

What EXACTLY is it that you want to do? This will help us guide on the proper and safe way to transfer data from one drive or system to another.

Specs on your Mac would also be quite helpful.

External

I doubt that it would damage it.

If it's in a format that a windows pc uses it's likely that it's read-only for OS X.

I believe fat32 is the only windows-compatible format we can write to.
But I was informed by a techie at Staples that that is a very old format and hardly ever used anymore...

Btfrost said:

But I was informed by a techie at Staples that that is a very old format and hardly ever used anymore...

Click to expand...

That's hilarious.

While its true that Windows computers have primarily used NTFS as their format of choice for quite some time now, FAT32 has never been more popular than it is today.

Nearly every consumer external hard drive and thumb drive and digital camera card sold today is formatted by default to FAT32. We're talking literally billions of devices.

"techies at Staples" -- lol!

That's almost as good as a Best Buy employee.