hdd issue

Ok guys, brand new to mac's and ran into my first problem. I am transferring my music folders from external hdd (used on a pc) to the internal hdd of my mbp. It will do so for a while until it runs into an error, "attempting to copy to the disc macintosh failed". I had looked for the "padlock" icon to check if there was a read/write permission issue but there is no padlock icon (may be the problem). Any light that can be shed would be great, cheers guys.

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

What format is the external hard drive using and were you able to successfully copy some of the folders and files before the error showed up?

There could be several reasons why the copy failed, one of which could be that some of the files are corrupt. Also, copying from a drive that is formatted as NTFS may cause an error due to permissions and ownership. OS X (without a driver) can only read from a NTFS drive not write to it.

thanks chscag, I think the issue is with the format of the hard drive. just trying to figure out whether i have to completely reformat the drive or if it's just a simple switch.