External HDD read/write question!

I've recently backed up everything from my old Windows machine onto two 1TB external hard drives so that I could use them with my MacBook Pro.

I'm currently unable to read or write to the hard drives from the MBP (it says that I can only read under the sharing & permissions tab of the "get info" window.)

I don't want to have to format these HDDs from the MBP, because I can't think of another way to back up all of my data. Help!

If you used them with a Windows machine, they are most likely formatted as NTFS. OS X can only read from an NTFS drive, not write to them.To enable full read/write access, you can use a program such as Paragon NTFS (PARAGON Software Group - NTFS for Mac, communication channel between Mac OS X and Windows) or NTFS 3G (NTFS-3G at Tuxera).