External Drive Permissions Locked to Read ONLY - HELP!

Hello:
I have recently moved from a powerbook to an imac. The external I used with the powerbook was working fine until I began to use it with the imac. Once I hooked it up to the imac, I only had read permissions. I have never set any of the permissions on the disk and have always left it open. Thinking it was just the imac, I plugged it back into the pb, to find it was also appears locked to read only. I have gone through the web looking for solutions and I cannot seem to find a solution.
When I open get info about the disk, under sharing and permissions, its says "you can only read"
under the list of name: wkim has read and write privlige, staff and everyone get read only. I am wkim, so what gives? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

ok. my problems were probably not related and were fixed by reinstalling 10.5.2 with the Combo Updater found on (www.apple.com/downloads)...this probably won't help you but won't hurt so may be worth a try...
your permission problems probably have something to do with user IDs changing from one machine to the next. Try first to "repair permissions" with Disk Utility on your main HD. you can also go to Terminal and navigate to the problem directory and enter "ls -ln" to see what user ID and group ID own the files. then type just "id" to see what your local ID is. if they don't match then you'll probably need to change them with chown or chgrp.
hopefully someone else will chime in here as 10.5 has created convoluted permission problems and I still haven't worked out my own...

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