Mac vs. Windows External HD compatibility

[Aeronyth]

Hello, I have a pbg4 running 10.5 that I would like to do a clean OS install on. I don't currently own an external HD, but I do have access to my roommate's, which is currently hooked up to a PC so im assuming its formatted in NTFS.

Is there a way for me to partition the drive, to leave his files intact and in an NTFS partition, and create a new mac (is it HFS?) partition that I can use to backup my data?

Thank you,
Jon

[djackmac]

It can be done but you'll have to copy his data somewhere else, then repartition the drive as Master Boot Record and set the format up as MSDOS, then copy your room mates data back on.

[Aeronyth]

Okay, so I can safely write my mac's files to a MSDOS formatted drive but not an NTFS drive?

[MisterMe]

It can be done but you'll have to copy his data somewhere else, then repartition the drive as Master Boot Record and set the format up as MSDOS, then copy your room mates data back on.You can write to NTFS-format drives if you have Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X (commercial) or NTFS-3G (free) installed.

[Aeronyth]

So I installed NTFS-3G, mounted the drive, copied a pretty big folder over and just left the computer for an hour or so. I came back to my computer sleeping (i think due to power saver? but i dunno) When i woke it up, the drive was there on the desktop but it had a little lock icon on the bottom of it, and now its only read-only and wont let me write anything. It looks like everything that I had set to copy did copy successfully..

The windows computer had no problems with it after the copy, either.

Whats wrong?

[EDIT] Scratch that, nothing copied.

??