File Transposing Dilemma

OK so some of you guys may have seen my thread from a few days ago about me switching from an old Dell Inspirion to an iMac. I have a dilemma that I havent yet been able to find the answer to. How am I supposed to transfer all of my media files to my new Mac if the external hard drive I have wont work for Mac? I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go..... Ive found that I can reformat it to work with Mac, but that requires erasing all of the data. And if I go buy a strictly Mac-compatible hard drive, then I cant get the files OFF of my old computer. What do yall recommend?

There shouldn't be any issue copying files from that external drive - whether it's formatted as FAT32 or NTFS. Your Mac can read both of those, and that's what it'll be if you were using it with Windows.

Yeah, I don't see the problem. Just plug the drive into the Mac, copy the files, then put the drive back on your PC.

hm..... multiple associates at the Apple Store confirmed that I wouldnt able to use it without reformatting the drive because its not the Mac model of the FreeAgent Go.

You wouldn't want to have the Freeagent Go for use with a Mac permanently without formatting it for Mac, of course, but for this limited use -- you have files on the drive that you want the Mac to READ and COPY ... it should work just fine.

Macs don't natively support WRITING files to NTFS formatted drives, as I suspect the Freeagent Go is currently formatted, but that's not needed for this particular operation.

Yep, if you're getting rid of the Dell and the Mac will be the only computer using this drive, you will want to change the format to HFS+. In the meantime, your Mac can read and copy files from that drive.

If you are going to keep the Dell and want to be able to move the drive back and forth between your Mac and a Windows machine, grab Paragon's 'NTFS for Mac'. This will enable OSX to write to the drive and also includes an app that enables Windows to read HFS+ formatted drives which comes in handy if you decide to install Windows via a BootCamp partition on your Mac.