Just switched but need help with file transfers

I just bought an 12" iBook G4 to replace my aging Dell Inspiron. I'm very happy with my iBook so far but I have about 50+ gb of music and photos saved to my Dell. My iBook only has a 30gb hard drive. I was given an external hard drive for Christmas. How do I transfer all my music and photos to the external hard drive for use on my mac? Im not keeping the Dell so I dont need to have an external hard drive that is compatible with both. My iBook is running OS X 10.4.11 and the external hard drive is a Maxtor 500g one touch. Any help would be appreciated!

To keep compatibility between OS X and Windows format the drive with FAT32 - assuming you have no files larger than 4Gb this won't cause any problems.

So plug the drive into the Dell, go to My Computer, right-click on the drive, hit format. In the dialogue box make sure FAT32 is the filing system and quick format is checked and hit OK. Then you can copy the stuff from your Dell to the drive and then you can plug the drive in to your iBook and use it as normal.

Mac OS X can read/write to FAT32 but only read from NTFS so that would be a waste of a 500Gb drive!

I'd then normally say copy the stuff from the drive to the Mac and reformat it with OS X filing system (forgot the name of it! )but you don't have the room to do that. However, it won't matter since its a external drive and you can also switch between PC/Mac as you wish with it.

HTH and Merry Christmas!

Martyp gives a good explanation.

The two most prevalent Mac photo apps, iPhoto & Aperture, both store your photos in a 'library', which is basically a folder on your HD set up for that propose only. I don't see why you couldn't choose to store the library on an external drive.

As for iTunes, it is not picky about where music is stored. You music 'library' is not a specific folder, but rather just a collection of pointers calling out the location of the songs you've imported. (This is a little different than the photo 'libraries' in which everything has to be stored in that specific folder only). You can import songs into the 'library' without actually copying them at all. iTunes just notes their location and references it as needed.

Thanks for the help. Ill try it out today

It didnt have FAT32 as an option. Is there anyway i can hook my pc up to my mac and have the external HD hooked up to my mac and transfer that way?

Did you connect the HDD to your Mac or your PC? Also are you using any third-party software that may've come with the drive?

If you did connect it to your PC and FAT32 wasn't there then which OS are you running?
If it is Windows 2000 Pro, XP or Vista - click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.
Go to the Disk Management tab and look for the external drive. Right-click and hit Format.
Type a volume label if required,
select FAT32 as the file system,
be sure to select 'Quick Format' if available,
click OK and then click OK on the second dialogue box.
The drive will begin formatting which should only take a moment or so.

You could format the drive in Mac OS too.

Connect the external HDD to the Mac,
Go to the applications folder>utilites and then open Disk Utility,
Select the drive from the list,
Enter a name for the drive,
Choose MS-DOS file system (this is FAT32),
Click erase.

Either of the options will do the job, but doing it on the Mac may be easier.