Converting old windows ntfs hard drives to mac

hello All
i hope that someone can help i have 3 old Ntfs hard drives, but my mac will not search thought them for files via spotlight, even though i have a program which allows the info to be read, peg something its called.
i want to convert the drives to mac, but is there a way to do which will keep the data on the drives and with out loosing the data or corupting it.
also i have a drive with window which i run boot camp and parallels, does that have to be nfts to work or can that be converted too?
i hope some can help
mike

Hi Mike and welcome to Discussions.
Spotlight can't index drives formatted to NTFS because OS X can't write on them (indexing involves writing on the drive) and so can't search them, but you can search them using EasyFind for instance because OS X can read NTFS volumes.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html
I believe with MacFuse you can add write capability to OS X for NTFS.
I'm wondering if you couldn't convert your NTFS drive (while connected to a PC) to FAT32 which is read/writeable by OS X. But note though that FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB, in case that matters to what you use the computer for. And _make sure_ you have a backup before attempting this. There are various ways of doing it it depending on the OS of the PC. I believe Partition Magic can do this, but Google around.
also i have a drive with window which i run boot camp and parallels, does that have to be nfts to work or can that be converted too?
What do you mean by this - is Windows installed on the drive using boot camp?
/p

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