Access permissions to external hard disks and media players

I've recently purchased an iMac. I have a number of external disks and media players that when connected are not allowed write access. When I use the disk utility I cannot change the permission from read only. Whats the solution to changing them to read and write access?
Thanks

Hi Kieran
Welcome to Apple Discussions
You can not write to them because they a formatted windows NTFS.
See > http://www.macworld.com/article/51972/2006/07/ww_drives.html
If you want to use an external disk with both PC's and Mac's, you will need to re-format it MS-DOS/FAT-32.
If you wish to use them with only the Mac's, you will need to Format then GUID partition/Mac OS X.
See > http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html
*+Proceed with caution when re-formatting disks+:*
1. Before re-formatting any drive you will need to backup the current data on it to a computer or another drive, because re-formatting will erase all the data on the drive.
2. Fat-32 has a file size limit of 4GB and will not allow single file transfers greater than 3.7 or 3.8GB.
3. You may not be able to change the format or write to many media players without special software.
Dennis

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