external drive not working help?

[detroitwhat]

Hey guys,
I just bought an external hard drive and when i plug it in and try to drag files onto it it says "the item -foldername- could not be moved because untitled (external hd) cannot be modified. I tried to download that usb mass storage drive on apple and it says that program cannot run on my computer.any body know what to do.
any help would be great and thank you

[gerbick]

Have you formatted the external drive?

Go to: Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.app

See if the external drive is even listed... if so, highlight it, and see what the Write Status is... should be Read/Write. Also, it should be in Mac OS Extended Format, not FAT32 or NTFS since those are Windows file formats.

That's a good place to start...

[detroitwhat]

THANK YOU SO MUCH
worked like a charm