Using Old Windows Disk on new MacBook Pro??

I am thinking of switching over to Mac very soon as i have an iPhone, iPod, iPad so may as well get the MacBook Pro 13" too. I just love the quality of the apple devices and don't mind paying a premium for them, you get what you pay for!!
I have a question which i hope everyone can help me with.
Firstly i have a hybrid drive that i am currently using in my windows machine which i would like to use in my new mac as it has an awful lot of music, photo's and videos already stored on it. I have the HDD partitioned so that all my files are on D: but windows 7 is on C: now my question is can i put the drive into the macbook and reformat the C: drive so that i can put apple os on there and still be able to see the D: drive and access all of my stuff rather than transfer everything over separately. Can anyone answer this for me please.
The reason i want to keep the hybrid drive is that it really does give faster boot times and access to mostly accessed programs and files.

Thanks in advance.


Jamie

Is the current drive formatted NTFS? If so, you'll need third party software to be able to WRITE to the drive (it will read). Personally, I'd copy the stuff from d to a temp device, then format the whole thing HFS+ and install the OS on it from there (although with Lion, that's a bit more difficult than it has been in the past, and I believe you'd need the recovery utility to do so). Then copy the stuff back from the temp device.

Why? Because I'm not a huge fan of running third party applications to write to disk. That's just me though, lots of people do it.. without issue.

Thanks Mike,

I don't mind transferring it at all just takes a bit more time. Can you have a separate partition on the hard drive like you do in windows. The only reason I have ever done this is incase of a problem with the system partition so I don't lose files. I know that you odont have the problems with mac as you do in windows but it is just something I am used to and yes the drive is NTFS.
The other question I have is can you organise pictures (jpeg) and files by date and things like that like in windows?

Jamie

If all of your files will fit onto the new Macbook's hard drive, I would transfer them, then reformat your old hard drive for Mac and transfer them back. You'll want to reorganize it anyway.

If this is an internal drive you'll need some kind of adapter to do this. This seems to be the one everyone recommends. I'm a little unclear if you want to use this as your primary or as a secondary/external drive.

I want to replace the standard 320gb drive with my hybrid 500gb one.
Then I will use the 320gb as an external as I already have a USB caddy for one.