New to MAC, External Hard Drive Problem Transfering files to MAC

Hello All.
First I'm new to the MAC world, just bought my powerbook pro yesterday. Love it. I tired looking for this topic and found similar post but no solutions that I understood.
10.4.9
I have a 260GB NTFS external hard drive with about 100 gigs of info on it. I used it with my PC, running XP Pro.
I want to be able to access that HD from my MAC but all I can do is read, I cannot write. I was hoping it would just hook up to my MAC and I'd be able to read and write.
I do not need to be able to use this HD with my PC anymore. I'm 100% MAC now. I was hoping someone could give me some advice on how to make that happen. Do I have to reformat my HD? What system is that FAT32, NTFS? Something else? And how do I go about doing it?
Thanks to all.
D-Power

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
You are correct, Macs can only write to FAT32, or Mac formatted hard drives with the built-in software, unless the Mac is networked to the PC, as this article describes:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=19652
You can also add Macfuse to the Mac, to connect to an NTFS drive, and that's linked here:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
To reformat the drive, you'll have to erase it with Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility. Thus before you can reformat it, you'll have to copy over any essential information. The Partition section under Disk Uitlity lets you create a GUID Mac formatted partition under its Options button, and that is ideal for both Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros. If the label under the screen says Powerbook, let us know, and we'll direct you to that forum instead, if we can't answer your question here. Apple Partition Map on the other hand is the ideal for Powerbooks, and PowerPC based Macs. Formatting GUID or Apple Partition map, will let you boot from that drive, to verify that a clone backup was done properly depending on which Mac you made the clone for. Formatting FAT32 or NTFS won't let you make a full backup of your internal hard drive, and only will let you use it for backing up user documents. I highly recommend Shirt-pocket Superduper for backing up, as my FAQ* explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
P.S. The MacBook Pro is the Intel version of the Pro notebooks. You posted to the Intel iMac forum. The Intel iMac looks like: . So unless you have that Mac, you are in the wrong forum. There is no such Mac as the Powerbook Pro. You'll see the label in front says MacBook Pro below the screen if that's what you got. Here's the forum for it for category reference:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=190
And pick a forum within it to post a new topic, if I can't answer your question here.
In addition, this nomenclature article will be helpful as well:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=503342&tstart=0
* Links to my pages may give me compensation.

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