Reformatting Windows (NTFS) disks for Mac OS X
I’ve bought several external hard drives recently to use for backing up under Leopard. Getting them reformatted from the pre-formatted Windows NTFS partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled has been unexpectedly problematical – usually the best chance has been to reformat (on the Mac) to MS DOS FAT format and then try to change the partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled in a second step. But it seems to depend on the drive’s controller hardware as to whether this is successful.
Carl Bach has published a way of getting Maxtor drives re-formatted. In fact – in my experience – the method works very well for drives from other manufacturers too, even cheap no-name 2.5” external drives have allowed themselves to be changed to Mac format using his method.