Hard drive "Read only"

Hey guys,
I am new to Mac. My hard drive has been working fine until recently it changed to "read only" mode. I tried to follow the steps form other discussion - verifying disk. When i clicked "verifying disk" , it came up as "verifying volume failed: Invalid request" and all ther options are greyed out.
could any of you help me out with this. I got important files in this hard drive . I am running Mac OS X version 10.7.4
Thanks heaps 

Tuscania wrote:
I completely agree with you.  I really don't mean to sound like an idiot or disregard what you're saying.  I'm obviously missing something, but I just don't see how that's possible because I used it last week without a problem.  I can't have accidentally reformatted it because all of my data is still there.  It would have been erased if I had.  On top of that, the process of reformatting a hard drive is a little too difficult to do accidentally.  So while I agree with what you're saying, how can it be possible when I used it just last week?
Is it possible that it's partitioned?  Or that you thought it was saved and it didn't (which would be nearly impossible to miss with all the things a Mac does).  You don't sound like an idiot or anything.  We are missing something, but there is just no way to write to an NTFS drive, unless you've got some software that helps you do that.  Does someone else have access to the drive?  They thought they were helping you out by saying "what person has their Windows drive still in FAT.  I'll help out my buddy Tuscania and reformat it." 

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