[stotan]

i was wondering if anyone could help.

I just switched to macs and i have a firewire drive that is formatted for the pc (ntfs).

I am able to plug the drive to my powerbook, but i can only read from the drive. It wont let me write to the drive. Is this because I need to reformat the drive to whatever format macs use? If so, does it mean that if I take my drive and plug it back into a wintel computer they wont be able to read or write to it? or maybe they will be able to read but not write?

Is there maybe some format that i can format the drive to so that I can plug it into either a wintel or a mac and be able to read and write from the drive?

cheers

[zigzag]

You probably need to hook it up to the Mac, open Disk Utility, select the FW drive, go to the Erase tab, set Volume Format to HFS+ (or MacOS Extended), and hit the Erase button. This will reformat the drive for the Mac (make sure you've backed up anything that's on the drive).

There are ways to make drives work in both Mac and Windows but I'm not sure how to do it. There's a utility called MacDrive but I don't know if it's recommended or not.