Help! I can't move files from my MacBook to my external hard drive!

Hey all..
I can't move files from my MacBook to my 40GB hard drive! Whenever i try to do that the com will reply that i can't move the files because the hard drive cannot be modified. This never happened before and how can it be solved?
Appreciate all answers thanks..

What filesystem is your external hard drive formatted as?
You can check this with the program called Disk Utility.
My guess is that it is formatted as NTFS, the default filesystem for windows XP. Mac OS X only supports read-only access to NTFS-formatted drives.
Reformatting, and with it erasing everything on your drive, to another filesystem would be a solution if this is the case.
Google recently released MacFUSE which should allow read-write support to ntfs-drives. Not recommended for the un*x-unexperienced, though.
Martin

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