External Hard disks suddenly "Access locked"...

Help!! :))
Whilst doing a Disk Utilities Permissions Repair on the system disk (Leopard)... After successful repair, all external disks are now locked and won't allow access.
Opening the INFO panel (Comand + I) for each disk simply reveals that the Read /Write privileges area is set to "custom".
Unlocking the Padlock using System Admin name and Password does not allow me to change the "custom" denomination back to "Read / Write".
Any ideas please...?
Many 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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Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!
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Regards
TD

External Hard disks suddenly "Access locked"...

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