External hard drive compatibility problems

i've made the switch from being a long time windows user to the macbook pro. i can play all my files from my external hard drive, but for reason it is keeping me from being able to create new file folders on the external hard drive.

An alternative, if you don't wish to reformat the drive, or need to be able to use files larger than 4Gig on it, is to install third party software that lets your mac both read from and write to discs formatted in the "NTFS" scheme often used on big Windows drives. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ and http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ provide a couple of examples.
If the drive is going to be used only on a mac in future, though, I'd personally be inclined to back it up and reformat with the Apple GUID partition Scheme and the HFS(+) partition scheme.
Cheers
Rod

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