Formatting an External Harddrive for LM compatibility

[animaguy]

I have a 350 gb external storage hdd.

It was recently formatted for NTFS.

I want to re-format it for ext4 or any format that is compatible with Linux.

I backed up all the data and reformatted but when I put the data back onto the HDD, the files are inaccessible. In otherwords, they will not open.

Does anyone have suggestion as to how I can reformat the HDD properly so that I can copy the data back to the HDD?

[ZubenElgenubi]

Actually, you didn't need to format the drive, Mint (and many other Linux distros) can handle perfectly NTFS file systems

[animaguy]

It is kind of too late.

But the problem is really permissions.

I chmode a+rwx the files I need, There are two many files to do them all at once (unless there is a way of mass chmoding over 50 gb of stored information) So my solutions is to do it one at a time.

[caf4926]

It's all kinda vague

Try chown -R on the top of the tree