External Hard drive won't edit?

I have been PC for 15 years and just moved to a MAC to do graphic design on for college and future. Just set this up 2 nights ago. I bought a brand new 20inch 2GB 2.66ghz, 320GB hard drive.
Now, I have just a plain ole'USB external hard drive with all of my music, picture,s and videos on it. Now there are some things on there that that have been added like album covers and stuff, tat I want to delete. It won't let me... It says that the folder cannot be modified.
Why?
Is the computer putting some sort of lock on the hard drive? Because when I plug that drive into my PC all of those extra album covers and stuff aren't there...
How do I fix this? Thanks for any help guys!

Hello and Welcome to Apple Discussions. 
I suspect that your external drive is formatted to the NTFS file system. Whilst a Mac can read an NTFS drive it can't write to it. Macs can read and write FAT32 drives. Mac only drives use HFS+ file system. You should copy all the content off the external onto the iMac, then erase the external and format it to FAT32 (called "MS-DOS" in Apple's Disk Utility). You can then copy all the content back and will have read and write access to it as will any PCs you connect it to. If you will not need to connect it to a PC again then use HFS+ (called "Mac OS Extended" in Disk Utility) as this is a superior system to FAT.
BTW this forum is for the much older iMac (Flat Panel) models
G4 (aka Flat Panel): Intel:
Click image to go to correct forum.
cheers
mrtotes

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