How do I change permissions from read only on my external hard drive?

I'm a new convert from PC to MAC and I'm kicking myself because it's been **** ever since.
My music and business documents are all kept on an external hard drive and that hard drive is NTSF.
My MacBook is reading the whole drive as read only. I'm trying to add my huge library to the cloud but it's not reading it all.
How can I convert the drive to FAT without losing everything. I have 91 gigs of music that as a dance teacher, cannot afford to lose.
Please help!

chombitafeya wrote:
If I'm only using Mac now, do I still follow #2 from above?
If you are going to use the external drive only with Macs now, you can consider the option to format the external drive with "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". In this case, only Macs will read the external drive, but compatibility will be better.
chombitafeya wrote:
If I go out and buy an external hard drive that's Mac compatible, will I still be able to transfer the files from my NTSF drive to the new Mac compatible drive or do I have to use a pc to solve this problem?
First of all, note that all external drives are compatible with Macs. If you find external drives which come as "for Macs", that's because they come formatted in "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
In that case, you will be able to transfer the files from the NTFS drive. Note that you can read NTFS drives and you can copy files from the NTFS drive to your Mac or other disks. The only thing you can't do is copy files to the NTFS drive

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