Can I use a PC external hard drive with a Mac?

Question

Also, I have an external hard drive that we use for our PC. It has photos, music, etc. Our PC is about to bite the dust, and we are probably getting a Mac. I know that I can use the external hard drive with a Mac, but do you have any idea if I have to reformat the whole thing and therefore lose all of the data on it if I don’t get it off there first?

Answer

Most of the time you can just plug in an external HD PC or not and it will just appear on your desktop. It depends how it was formatted. If you get a message that says it was specially formatted and can’t be read, you’ll need to reformat with the disk utility in applications/utilities.