Fire Wire Hard drive in Read Only mode?

[Techno]

Hello,

A friend of my dads in NY got a new external hard drive w/ fire wire card yesturday. The maker of this combo is Lacie. From what my dad said, the guy put the fire wire card in his machine, Windows XP found it fine and he then did all the correct steps in formatting it. Now when he tries to load something onto this drive it comes back w/ a message saying this hard drive is read only. Any clue on how to change that? I have no clue what the systems specs are except its a year old gateway.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Can't imagine what might cause that other than a virus (the first virus I encountered in I think 1994 resulted in write protecting the hard drive). Normally hard drives don't have any way of making the entire drive read-only, and I've seen nothing that would do that for external drives either. He should perhaps contact LaCie about the problem.