External hard drive compatability

hi, i have an external harddrive that's formatted as fat32 and i'm just wondering if any mac files can go on it and back on to a mac?
i've got videos and music that xfer fine between macs and pcs but my friend is going to upload a bunch of dv footage from his mac onto it and i just want to make sure that it will upload onto it and download to my imac properly. i don't know anything about dv so i don't know if it's a special file or something.

Hello... well i am kinda new to mac i have had a pc (windows) for last say 10 years or more and now i have gone to mac but im have n a bit of a prob just wanted to know if anyone could help?? i had a 2nd hard drive in my pc and formated it as fat32 n put loads of songs on it.. i then took it out and put it into a external case and when i plug it into the mac it says DISK INSERTION The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer... do i INITIALIZE IGNORE OR EJECT ?? i spoke to them at pc world n they said yes a fat32 will work on mac but i need to know cuz i need the songs of it also i want to know how to play AVI n WMA fils on a mac cuz it wont let me install the WMP9.dmg for some reason please help if u know what to do please add me [email protected]
Imac 24" Mac OS X (10.4.8) intel

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is the "Western Digital Media Center 250GB Hard Drive" compatible with the macbook pro
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Your welcome.
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wendybird wrote:
I also have a lot of pictures stored on the external hard drive that I can't lose.
(1) Any hard drive may fail at any moment. If you don't have a backup for this external hard drive, your pictures are half-gone already.
(2) If you're trying to make this drive a repository for your music and pics, then its best to format it as FAT32. That's the file system with the widest compatibility, and you'll be able to use the drive with Mac, Win, media players, even TVs with built-in media players. For practicality, it's probably best to keep it attached to a desktop machine and share it on your home LAN for all other devices.

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Sorry you had so much trouble hooking up a hard drive to the base station. I've done some experimenting with the feature and this is what I've found out.
You can use either the native Mac format, Mac OS Extended, or the Microsoft format known as FAT. Apple calls FAT, MS-DOS File System in Disk Utility.
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One thing I don't have installed is the iDisk Utility. I'm wondering if it may be the cause of the problems you were having. But reading through your post it may also be the difference between expected behaviour and the proper procedure for discovering and mounting network volumes. Let me explain.
You only mention having trouble getting the drive to show up on your Desktop, you didn't describe how you went about discovering the network drive. It isn't just suppose to show up on your desktop when you plug it in to the Extreme base station. It doesn't work like the iDisk or disks connected directly to your computer using USB/Firewire.
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I don't have a volume large enough to hit any limits the base station may have but I did read a post about someone who said they had a 1.5 TB volume connected and could only see 1 TB of it. They were forced to partition the drive to see all available space and of course the volumes showed up as two separate drives. One thing wasn't made clear though. They didn't say what volume format they were using to format the drive, Mac OS Extended or MS-DOS.
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I'm a new convert from PC to MAC and I'm kicking myself because it's been **** ever since.
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chombitafeya wrote:
If I'm only using Mac now, do I still follow #2 from above?
If you are going to use the external drive only with Macs now, you can consider the option to format the external drive with "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". In this case, only Macs will read the external drive, but compatibility will be better.
chombitafeya wrote:
If I go out and buy an external hard drive that's Mac compatible, will I still be able to transfer the files from my NTSF drive to the new Mac compatible drive or do I have to use a pc to solve this problem?
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If I were you I would bite the bullet and upgrade to Snow Leopard. You will still be able to use AppleWorks by installing the Rosetta emulator included in Snow Leopard. And, it's a much better OS version than Tiger.
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