I have recently been handed my company's external disk drive collection to convert over for use on the Mac, but I am having problems which I cannot seem to resolve that easily.

The disks formatted to NTFS, are minimum of 250gb per disk, and split into partition to make the storage more 'logical', and the primary partition is accessible, but read only; however, the second (sometimes third, and fourth) partitions show up on the desktop, and but there is 'nothing' on the disk when I come to view them.

What I am wanting to do is to be able to copy the information off of the partitions, to the Mac hard disk, and then convert the recently emptied disk on to FAT format for use with both the Macs and the PC, then copy the files back.

The logical, and straight answer would just be to hook up to a PC and copy that way, however, I do not have a PC at my disposal with sufficient capacity to do this with; and I am loathed to take them home with me and use my big system, because of a few reasons, mainly because people think that external enclosures (solid, metal, chunky building blocks...) are great for letting the niece play with and stick magnets to. (Still paying the 1100aus$ on the last one that I have had to have rescued!)

Any ideas would be very much appreciative. (Oh, and I have tried disk utility from Finder, and a startup disk, with no effect!)

Network a PC to the Mac and copy everything over the network to the Mac? Helps if they both have gigabit ethernet by the way.