western digitgal questions

[spooky1]

So I recently bought a WD my Passport 1TB to use as NAS. Also my Windows was in the process of dying at the time so i transferred all my important files to the WD and then copied them to a holding file on my linux machine while I reformatted into ext3. then came the problem. i tried copying all my file back to the drive and it comes back with access denied. so i go to /media thinking i might get to the bottom of it and find 1 folder (considerably smaller than the drive btw) which was also not accessible i tried dropping it into the folder and directly into /media unseccessfully. Presumably, there was an error during formatting so i reformatted in ext3 and then ext4 both to no avail. Finally, i tried formatting to ntfs and dragging the files into the folder(same folder was there, now much bigger). worked like a charm!

 

so my questions are these

 

since when does linux write to, much less format a ntfs drive?

 

what's going on inside my dumb*** external drive?