I just bought a Moving Star external hard drive for my Mac laptop. It came with a driver installation disc, but the CD is too small and wont be taken in by my disc drive. I am afraid to put the install disc in, in case it gets stuck. Without installing the hard drive using this disc, the hard drive shows up on my desktop but is read-only. What do i do?

I would be tempted to format the drive using the disk utility whch can be found under applications and then utilities once opened choose your drive in the left hand window and the on the right hand side click on erase. Choose your volume format and name and then erase. Hope this helps.

Could be read only because Mac cannot write to NTFS formatted drives without installing a driver. The driver is not made by apple but is used with popular distros of Linux like Ubuntu. You can download and install it for your mac from www.ntfs-3g.org I have personally used that ntfs driver since beginning of 2009 and have had no problems. Option 2 would be to format it to a different format, the most universal format is FAT32, it has once limitation, you cannot store a single file bigger than 2Gb.