Password Protecting External Drive

I have a powerbook G4 (1.5ghz superdrive version) I have a external lacie firewire drive (500gb) and me and my friends are in AM Wired (Morning program for school). We would like to use my external hard drive with the powermac's (dual 1.2ghz with osx i believe panther) I would like to use my external drive with my powerbook and then be able to bring it in to the tv studio at my high school and plug it into one of the 11 powermacs that the school has (btw they are upgrading all to G5's or the new intel macs after as soon as the new tv studio is built just in time for me to graduate this year).

So my question is is there a way for me to password protect my hardr drive so other students (esspeically beginners) don't use my hard drive and ruin our current projects? The hard drive will be locked up but anybody can ask to use a hard drive an just take mine just because mine looks the biggest... so what are your suggestions?

a padlock will do.
Isnt it possible to right click on your folder and change the ownership & permission?...

Get info

Permission
Others - No Access

If you and your friends are using the same account to access the disk. Then the previous suggestion plus one addition.

Permission
Group - No Access
Others - No Access

If you are using different accounts. Then you would need to create a group and make each user account a part of that group. Then also change the group of the disk itself to the new group. After which you would change the permissions to

Group - read, write, execute
Others - No access

ahh I thought there was a different way.. the problem is there are no user accounts on the powermacs, they are just always on.. since they are only used for video editing and everybody has their own firewire drive, but alot of the other kids just try to use some of the other kids (like mine is going to have a couple gigs of sound effects and jump backs that I went through the trouble of getting and don't want other people to use it)

Okay, that puts a different spin on things. Have you looked in to encryption software?

Something like the following: Crypt.

You can search either Version Tracker or Mac Update. For either crypt of encryption software.

thank you rman! gonig to look into that now

Or you could just create an encrypted disk image the size of your external hard drive (I prefer to create an encrypted sparse image so I can use the remaining space as needed, but that is semantics.)

Disk Utility => File => New Blank Image
Size (as appropriate)
Encryption - AES - 128
Format (whichever you prefer, sparse is the size of the encrypted data, read/write is the size of capacity. A sparse image is thus smaller most of the time but also saves take longer.)

When you save the image it will prompt you to type in a password. Make sure you do not forget it, because there is no way around not knowing the password.

If you do do this though I would make periodic backups at home or somewhere. Cryptoloop images are pretty stable in 10.4 but I can not bring myself to trust them wholeheartedly.

Thanks Kokopelli, I'll have to look into that when I finally get Tiger.