real annoying external write protection problem

PeakOutput

ok ill keep this as short as possible

i bought a second hand targadata box 250gb external hard drive a few months ago all was fine

then my pc laptop broke so i bought a new macbook now i know that i cant write to an ntfs formatted drive on a mac so i bought a new 500gb hddrive today and copied everything from my old one onto it no problem(its already fat32)

now i wana use my old one for time machine(mac backup) so i need to convert it to fat32. so i go to my pc desktop and download partition magic and connect the old hard drive. BAAAM i cant delete the files or do anything its write protected all of a sudden. now i have no idea how i would of gone about write protecting this drive in the first place so i doubt i did it by accident. i cant see a switch on the actual drive that i could of accidentally turned on and i was able to write to it and delete files fine with my old laptop

so whats the problem? how can i fix it? i really dont want to have to shell out for another new external

PeakOutput

anyone please?

zod

know nothing about macs

the ntfs partition belongs to the old laptop,
1. right click "my computer" choose manage
2. go to disk management
3. Find the old ext disk and partition
4. Delete the partition, create new patition .. choose not to format
5. download fat32format and format new drive letter to max size

PeakOutput

you sir are a legend.

doing exactly what i want it to now thanks

zod

PeakOutput wrote: »

you sir are a legend.

doing exactly what i want it to now thanks