Can't change permissions to external hard drive

Okay...so far switching to a mac from a PC has been extremely painful. I currently have an external harddrive that I only have read access to. When I go to File>Get Info I cannot change this to Write access. How can this be so hard.

Check the disk's format in the Get Info window; if this is listed as Windows NT Filesystem, you cannot write to it from Mac OS X. In this case, you will need to copy everything that you want to keep off of it and then use the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to erase the drive.
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    ld3mb wrote:
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