How can I change the settings of an external hard drive?

I have a 250-GB external hard drive connected to my Mac mini, whose files and folders I can´t delete as it shows up as a read-only disk. According to the Mac help, I can use the files on a disk by clicking on the "Get Info" label and selecting "Ignore ownership on this volume" at the bottom of the menu. However, when I try to do that, the "Ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox doesn´t even show up on the menu. Any suggestions or alternatives to get to delete those files I no longer need? Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Mac mini 1.66 GHz Intel core duo   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   1 GB DDR2 SDRAM

If you want to erase the entire drive you can format it with Disk Utility (in Applications/Utilities).
Mario is right about NTFS. If you drive is formatted as such (which would mean it was used by Windows at some point) then the issue is related to permissions (actually NTFS-formatted drives don't have permissions, but Access Control Lists instead), it's just that Mac OS X can't write to these disks.

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