external hard drive/free agent drive

I am new to mac computers. I have an external hard drive that has backed up files from my old windows pc. I tried to use it with my mac air and got a message saying

"are you sure you want to erase the back up disk "free agent drive". Erasing will destroy all information on the disk and can't be undone."

Do I need to buy another external hard drive? I want the files (mostly word and excel) that I have backed up on the external hard drive. I don't want to lose them.

What do I need to do? I appreciate any advice you could give me. Thanks.

"Reggie"

Be patient and someone will reply - I had same issue and ended up fine. Might search in last few weeks and find my threads.

If you are going to just use the external drive for you Mac then go ahead and reformat it HFS+ Extended Journaled. If you are going to use it for both Mac and PC then you will have to partition it. The partition for your PC should be fat 32 if you want to write and read to it.

Can't Apple read and write to Fat32? Thought it could.

I don't know why it would ask such a thing, but the answer would be "no." You don't want to destroy all data.

Then access the drive normally.

This thread is not consistent with my experience. I am reading my extrernal hard disc just fine with both mac and windows.