Ok, I'm about to get a Snow iMac G3, 600 Mhz, 256 MB ram and 40gb hard drive but it is a costom made with a CD-Rom. I like movie editing and want to put the dvd-rw drive from my Compaq into an external case and use it on the iMac. But, I looked at the specifications of the Dvd-rw drive I have and it says for Windows only. But the external firewire case says it is Mac compatable. Will it matter if I use it? Or will it not work? I will have to buy the firewire case anyways, I just wanted to know if I could use the drive I have now. And another question, if I get a firewire case for my 40gb hard drive on my compaq, can I use it with a mac after I format it or whatever I have to do? Or do I have to buy a new one that works with Mac? Thanks

I've never owned a Mac so I'm new to all of this.

You can use the Hard Drive.
You might be able to use the DVD-RW by trying DVDFlash 2.2 but why not buy a DVD-RW that will work from the start look around you can get a new pioneer 109 for $49 or an external for $79 on ebay

Hard drives are pretty much 100%
compatible..that's never a problem..
The DVD-RW should work fine as long as
there's driver support in whichever Mac OS
you're using - it could be too new for the
OS, depending which it is..likely not a
problem with Tiger (OSX 10.4) but could be
with earlier and classic (OS9)
versions..flashing the DVD drive is totally
unnessecary, except only,if you want to boot
the mac off the DVD-RW..and even then G3s
can't boot off Firewire anyways..
With a G3 tho, you might want to look for an
MPEG card for the DVD - a small chip that
fits on your video card , allowing hardware
DVD decoding instead of software decoding .
I find it absurd that any hardware
manufacturer would specify "windows
only"..OS's are designed to support hardware
options, hardware isn't supposed to be
designed to support only one OS! besides ,
it's up to the OS to decide which hardware
to supply drivers for..unless the hardware
were actually rigged to *not* work in
anything but windows!
Unlikely, but not outside the realm of
possibility, i suppose.....

Ok, that's good. I purchased a copy of the newer OS Tiger. So it should work. Now I have another question, I don't know if my hard drive is 3.5 or 2.5? There are many cases for both sizes of hard drives and I have no idea which is which. I have a Compaq 40 Gig. And if I can use it with my Mac, do I just format it completly and install Mac OS 10.4 on it? I'm not really sure how this all works.