New 1TB My Passport shows as write-protected on Mac 10.6.8

New, out-of-the-box 1TB My Passport seems to be unusable on my iMac. I installed and ran the drive utilities, set and unset security numerous times, rebooted, still the iMac says the Passport is write-protected.

It will not allow me to create new folders, and my backup software doesn’t see it.

How can I get this drive to be usable on myMac? Do I have to reformat it? If so, what file system?

If the drive came formatted for windows NTFS it will be read only on a Mac. If that’s the case it will need to be reformatted for Mac.

Joe