Windows External Drive - Moving to Mac?

I have an external harddrive that I used with my Windows PC. I want to now use it with my Mac. It is formatted NTFS, and has a lot of files on it that I want. Should I move the files and then reformat it? How exactly do I reformat it?

If you plan to write to the drive, then you will need to copy the data off and reformat. If you are going to read only, then you don't have to do anything.

like rman said, you will only be able to read from ntfs. you will not be able to modify or delete.

you can use the disk utility under applications\utilities while the drive is mounted to reformat (obviously after you save anything you want somewhere else).

if you want to use the rive as read/write while attached to either windows or mac OSs, format as FAT32. i've done this to two different external hard drives with no issues whatsoever.

No matter what, you will want to attach it to your Mac, read in all the files of interest and then reformat it to either FAT32, if you plan to use it with both Windows and Mac OS X, or HFS+ if you plan to use it with just your Mac.

Reformatting may be easiest with your Mac - fire up Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder) and use it to do the work. I have done this with several external drives and it works very well.