New drive -  can i not use on mac and windows?

A year ago i bought a usb 2 wd external drive which i formatted on windows so that i could use it on both mac and osx - No probs.
I now have a seagate 750gb firewire 400 drive (thats formatted to NT) i want to do the same as i did with the usb2 0 ie format on windows so that i can use on mac and xp.
In the seagate manual it says that swapping data between windows and osx is BAD and YOU WILL LOSE DATA if you do this (it says i need madrive - but what if i want to get data of a college drive, or someone who doesnt want macdrive installed?)- is this manual statement true? i havent lost any data between my usb2 drive in the year ive had it!
Also, formatting the seagate drive to ms-dos file system on mac - this makes it mac only doesnt it?

Hi,
I do the same with my two WD externals.
You would need MacDrive if you want to use the NTFS (NT filse system) with the Seagate.
But if you choose FAT32 (that's what OSX calls MS-DOS) you don't need any kind of extra software to access (read/write) it from both Mac and PC.
One minor issue with FAT32 (MS-DOS) is, that the file size of a single file is limited to 4GB.
Regards
Stefan

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