Transferring files from iMac to External Drive issues. Please help

I have a 500gb Western Digital external hard-drive. I began using it on a PC, but got a Mac a couple of months ago. There are a couple of problems that I am encountering. First of all, the folders that I had on my external drive (music, movies etc.) are all locked, and no matter what I try on the Mac, I cannot unlock them.
That really did not cause too much of an issue, because I would just drag them onto the drive, and put them in the proper folders when I connected it to a Windows machine.
However, recently when I try to transfer an album from the Mac to the external, I get an error message that says:
The finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "Song/Album.mp3" could not be read or written. (error code -36)
Basically my two questions are how do I unlock the folders on my external drive, and what is causing this error to start all of a sudden?
Any help would be appreciated

Open up Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Select your external drive on the left then under the Erase tab select MS-DOS(FAT) as your volume format. Keep in mind that re-formatting your drive will erase all of the data so make sure you have it all backed up on your computer before you re-format.
http://ftp.georgetek.com/George/DiskUtilMS-DOS.png
Are you replacing your PC with the iMac or are you still going to use both computers?
George

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