External Hard drive suddenly will only read! How can I make it read/write again?

Hi folks,
I'm working with a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 320gb External Hard Drive on the imacs here at my university. I have it formatted to ExFAT so that I could use it with my pc as well but I've never had to so far so it's only ever been used on the uni imacs.
It's been fine for working on media projects until suddenly when i came back to uni after the Christmas break I went to continue working on a film project and realised the external hard drive now said read only??
One thing I did was to put all of my work from last semester (which is everything that was on the hard drive into a single folder) could that have caused the problem?
And does anyone know how i can reset my permissions to read/write without causing damage or risk to the files on the hard-drive as I can't clear the disk (i have no where else to store the 185gb of video footage).
I'd really appreciate it if anyone could tell me how i can fix it? I know how to do all of this on my pc but i've no idea with the mac as i only use it for my media projects here in the university.
Thanks!
DrF ;-)

Out of curiosity , will this method also work for an external drive formatted to NTFS.. I have a lot of data that I have nowhere to Float while re-formatting the drive , so If this method would allow me to keep the data and still fix the problem that would be great !!  At the moment the drive is formatted to NTFS and permissions say Read/Write , but I can only Read.. Very Frustrating as my mac drive is running low on space and performance is being affected.. Any help appreicated !!

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