Transferring my external drive from mac to windows

Hi,
I have been having problems w/my itunes (taking forever to update my library). I have and use my iMac. Since Apple doesn't help with this problem (based on my seaches through apple support here), I called Geek Squad through Best Buy. They were able to identify the file that is causing the problem. The file is on my external hard drive, which is also where I store all my music. She attempted to take it from my external and drag it into the garbage, but it won't allow for that b/c my external has to be reformatted (another error message I have had for a while). Her suggestion was to hook up my external hard drive to a windows computer to get that problem file off and then re-hook it up to my Mac computer. This wont' reformat the external drive (I have to figure out this problem later) but she said if I can get rid of this on a PC, I should be able to access my itunes w/out waiting hours for the library to be updated.
So, my question is this: If my external hard drive has been formatted for an apple computer and has only been used on an apple computer, is it going to damage anything if I hook it up to a PC? I have all of my songs on this (they aren't on my iMac hard drive) and I don't want to damage these. I am also considering just buying another external hard drive and transferring these tunes to that new one. Thanks.

cjmandel wrote:
I don't know if I understand how to tell waht size the internal drive is. When I click on the "About this Mac" option, I see that this says " 2GB 800 MHz" I don't know if this answers the question correctly though.?
Compressing my music using the default itunes setting? How would I know if I am doing this?
Thanks for the help!
To tell what size the internal HD is open a new Finder window and on the left look for a drive probably called iMac HD then type Command I (I as in Ivan) and Command is the key next to the spacebar on your keyboard. It will tell you the capacity and look similar to:

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After losing an external drive [dont ask....] -   I got another one : 2TB WD formatted properly [ OS extended journalled for mac ] ready for action to move my thousands of files and images and ppts in hundreds of folders across from the laptop to this drive because I travel a bit with the laptop and this is too risky not to back up at home.
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Your suggestion sounds very promising - I didn't know about 'cloning'.
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Would this be the sizeof the internal hard drive = c.500 gb ?   =   under the HD icon on desktop is written :
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I can erase and start agin on the new external drive - so this plan is to make two partititions, rather than the one at present, and make one of them 500 gb ?
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