I had to transfer data from my mac to windows machine. I plugged in my external usb hard drive and to my surprise I found it had been mounted as read-only drive. I tried to look for the solution. Found that it needs to be in FAT32 to be able to read-write in both MAC and windows. Since my drive was NTFS. Leopard mounts it as read-only drive. So I had one option to reformat the drive to FAT32. But I did not have enough storage capacity somewhere else where I could keep the existing data. Then google came like an angel to solve my problem. I goggled for the "NTFS read-only on MAC leopard" and found something called "macFUSE", an open source project hosted in google code repository, developed by Amit Singh, employee of Google. It is a software to mount any file system (both local and networked) in mac. In other words it allows us to use any FUSE (File-system in USErspace) file systems in Mac. Also to get my NTFS working with it I had to install NTFS-3G driver which allows macFUSE to load NTFS with read and write permissions. This is exactly what I was looking for my requirement of cross-platform compatible storage.
Simplest way to get it working is download this two packaged binaries and install them. Restart your box. It will mount your drive with required permissions. For more details you can go through this.
Here is a video demostration that might help people.
Also I found this video is pretty good which explains beyond NTFS.
If you have enough time you can watch his presentation on macFuse.
All the best.
