External Hard Drive - Migrating from Windows to MAC

Hi -
Just bought myself an iMAC. I have an external hard drive connected to my XP laptop.
Can I read from and write to this drive?
Do I need to reformat the drive (and lose the files in the process)?
I checked the archives, but couldn't find any posting that directly asked this question. Apparently if the drive is FAT32 formatted, I shouldn't have any issues. What if it is not?
Thanks

I was in the same situation as sunahag and the external drive worked fine...for awhile. One day it froze up the iMac so I disconnected the drive and rebooted the iMac. iMac works fine but haven't be able to get the external drive to work with the iMac again. When I connect the external it won't run (indicator which is normally green turns red). Still works with the Windows XP laptop.
Any suggestions, I still need to get more data off the external.

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