can i password protect a USB hard drive?

[cantthinkofone]

i want to get a external hard drive for 2 reasons. 1: i want to download files at school, and bring them back and put them on my mac. i have dial-up here, and they have a T1 at school. and 2: i want my own hard drive apart from the hard drive i have in my G5.
Can i get a program or something to make it so when i open the hard drive on my mac, i have to type in a password? I dont care about password protecting it at school, as i will be using it the whole time, and no one else will be using it. We use windows xp pro at school, and i have a G5 10.3.5 here at home.

 

[mnkeybsness]

Why do you want to password protect it? I'm a little confused.

You could set the permissions on the drive to only be accessible by your user name through the "Get Info..." dialogue box, but I think that may mess up access from other computers.

 

[thedoc1111]

No that could easily be overwritten by any user with root access.

You would want to password protect it to secure the data in case the drive was lost.

If you want to move the drive between OS X and an unprivileged Windows account then there is little you can do. Any PC password-protect utility will likely render the drive useless in a Mac unfortunately.

Otherwise I would recommend an encrypted read-write disk image a la FileVault,, but that would only work well between OS X computers.