Western Digital external drive set to read only?

Question

I have a Western Digital Passport drive which I bought for using with my Windows Vista machine - however I now use it with OS X, but for some reason I cannot delete files off the drive. When I GetInfo for the drive it says READ ONLY.

How do I get around this?

Only a few days ago I could copy files to it but now it says it's read only.

Answer 1

The drive is probably formatted as NTFS - OS X by default will only read NTFS, and not write to it. You can use a 3rd party utility to add NTFS write support to your OSX system, however. See the answers here for solutions that allow you to do this.