Help With File Attributes

I got my 1st Imac last week and I am trying to organise all my music on it. I bought an MP3 tag editor called Jaikoz, and when I try to open a music folder on my external hard drive, it says it cant open the file because they are read only.

I searched help and found out to "Get Info" from the Finder menu and then to click "sharing and permissions". However, this is where the help failed me - it said to click the lock and type my user name and password. That's the first problem - I cant see a lock icon and I therefore cannot follow the rest of the instructions to amend the files as "write".

I dont know what version of os X it is or how to check - I went to 10.5 for the prefix in this thread.

Can you help?

Thanks.

It's at the very bottom of the "Get Info Panel"
on the bottom right is the little lock icon, this icon is found throughout the system preferences (not always the same place) for locking your setting so you don't accidentally change them

the Sharing and Permissions group is also the last in the panel, there you can change permissions

just a comment, you can use iTunes to change the tags if mp3

The external is most probably formatted as NTFS (check that it is)

Without extra software OS X cannot write to an NTFS formatted drive

louishen said:

The external is most probably formatted as NTFS (check that it is)

Without extra software OS X cannot write to an NTFS formatted drive

Click to expand...

So if I copy the songs t the Imac I should be able to do it?

what louishen meant is that Mac can't read the NTFS file system BY DEFAULT ... however YOU CAN download a plug-in called NTFS-3G with which your Mac will recognize the ntfs filesystem and thus you will have no problems reading/writing to the disk

... u might have to adjust the permissions like you said too, but after u sort out the filesystem problem

(before u install NTFS-3G also install MacFUSE)
u can easily google these or look on this forum, as it has already been mentioned

Thanks all.