Storage Devices can not be written to

Hello
I am very confused, I have bought a new Imac having been a pc windows user all my life, and from my laptops I have various external storage devices, The Imac finds them and I can drag files from device onto the Mac, However I am not able to move stuff from Mac to Storage device on any device, I have checked the info section for the drive and it says its only read only, yet I have plugged it back into a computer and it says everyone has read and write
I even bought a storage device from Apple an 250gb Iomega and set it up as Time Machine Facility thinking I could then plug that into my pc and copy the files I wanted to my windows laptop
But the windows laptops or windows pc can not find that new drive
Any help would be much appreciated
Thanks
Paul

Hi Paul,
sounds to me that your 'various external storage devices' all use NTFS as file system. Disk Utility should tell you that too.
NTFS is a Microsoft Windows file system which is readable from Mac OSX, but not writable without third-party helper.
Same or vice versa, with your Iomega Time Machine harddisk. Windows don't knows a thing about the file system that Mac OSX uses.
Easiest way to use an external harddisk with OSX and Windows is to reformat the harddisk using the FAT32 file system (in OSX it is called MS-DOS in Disk Utility).
Mac OSX and Windows can read and write to harddisks that use FAT32.
*But be aware:* Reformatting a harddisk erases everything that is already on it !!
Regards
Stefan

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