How to format read-only external drive

[iMpathetic]

Well, my dad just gave me some surplus from his lab- a Seagate 200GB external FireWire drive. it works fine, but when I hit command-I and got info, it says it's read-only. I'm on an iMac running Panther. How do I go about restoring it to read/write goodness?

Thanks a lot, this is the biggest hard drive I've ever owned!

 

[swiftaw]

Can you format it in Disk Utility?

 

[iMpathetic]

Oh duh! Sorry, I thought I posted that. Everything is greyed out.

 

[richard.mac]

so if you plug in the hard drive and mount it so it appears on the desktop and go into disk util and select it in the sidebar, the options are grayed out under the erase tab?

if the disk is read only its NTFS format. i dont know about panther but it may not be able to reformat NTFS. do you have a spare PC about so you can format it to FAT32? and then disk util will be able to format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

 

[iMpathetic]

Hey, thanks for the reply! Anyway, I discovered that i could stil partition it, so I did, and now i have 186.9GB of fun! *close da thred*