Permissions with an external Hard Drive

Have just got a new 20 inch Intel Core Duo(1)and its great. Being a recent switcher, a lot of my stuff is on external hard drives formatted by windows XP machines. I am able to access the photos, music etc, but when I try to delete or modify anything I am told that I am not Authorised to change it. I have read only status. I have tried altering the permissions via the utilities in OS X but everything useful is greyed out. I am not even allowed to just delete the whole thing!
The hard drive is a USB Porshe Lacie drive.160Gb
How can I gain access to delete/change my files?
Please help

The drive's are almost certainly formatted as NTFS. Mac OS X can only read from NTFS volumes, it cannot write to them. Since it cannot write to them, it cannot delete anything, since the FATs (File Allocation Tables) cannot be updated.
OS X can read and write to FAT32 formated disks, so your only option is to reformat the drives to HFS+ (preferable) or FAT32 (if you still need them to be accessable by Windows machines).

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