trying to use a maxtor one touch III with my mac book pro

That's a hard drive, right? Not a flash drive? You should be able to format it no problem... in fact it should have given you a choice when you plugged it in. I'm assuming you have tried and that's what it said, not that you looked on the box. If you haven't tried it, do so.

If it's formatted for Windows and you can't get it to format, you can always install software to let your write to NTFS drives (by default, you can only read them).

You should be able to format it without a problem, but I believe the OneTouch feature doesn't work on Leopard.

Just use Disk Utility to reformat it to HSF+.

pastrychef said:

Just use Disk Utility to reformat it to HSF+.

Click to expand...

...and let Time Machine do the rest! That's if that's what you're using it for.

to make the disk HFS+, do the following:

1) open Disk Utility
2) select your drive in the left column
3) click on the Erase tab in the middle of the window
4) for volume format, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
5) select Erase

voila!