External hard drive problem. HELP

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OK you guys seem to know what your talking about, maybe you can help me.

I have a 500 gig hard drive that im quite happy with, iv used around 150 - 200 so far but have had this problem for a few months now.

All of a sudden all the files on there be it music, pics or anything i can not edit, delete or move yet they work fine. The music plays, the pics i can view
but if i try to delete, move or edit then names it says this file is corrupt or unreadable. Some times it says please run the disc clean up or somthing which i do and it takes hours (hours that i cant use the computer when its running) and it dose nothing to affect the files, there still the same, useable but not able to edit in any way.

Any ideas?

Were thes files copied from a CD or DVD?

in which case they can retain there read only attribute

open a command line
change directory to the folder the files reside and type: attrib *.* -r

Ok that went right over my head.

The files are mostly downloaded, Some are from CDs butit has affected every file weather its pics or MP3 even the folders there in i cant edit.

Whats a comand line?

You may have it encoded with the NTFS format. This would be one simple reason to explain, by which you would have to regain "ownership" of the files, or set rights to certain groups

Ok then, how would i do that?

In Windows you would need to open
1) "My Computer"
2) Find the drive
3) Select the drive
4) Use mouse button 2
5) Go down to properties and it should give you a pie chart of space used Blue and pink
6) Look for FAT32 or NTFS next to "Filesystem" RAW = blank or corrupted
7) Report back which one you have.

Ive had similar problems with USB 2.0 storage devices plugged into a USB 1.1 slot.

I'd presume it's NTFS file system with some permissions set ...

Ok il give that a try thanks, at work at the mo so il report back once im home cheers.

Ok yep its NTFS

Any ideas?

I did a guide on this for someone on another forum, I'll give you the link until I have time to put in order

Photobucket link with reference screenshots

The shots were taken in numerical order and will take me some time to put them back into a knowledgeable order that makes sense, until then, take a look. There are only 2 sets. Taking ownership and making accessible to anyone (ideal for external hard-drive enclosure)

Being an external hard drive it would not be very likely to be infected as a file would have to be run from that location. It is rare, but does happen. Sometimes when you transfer hard drives to any other computer you have problems. And this is where NTFS sucks, setting file permissions, taking ownership, etc. Once you have the background on who owns what, you can move on to the next problem. Sometimes a corrupt MFT doesn't help. Once that is done, there command sets that can be used which give more control compared to the GUI version

Cheers keith
Il take look at those pics and see if i can make sence even if there not in order.
But damn i hope it get this sorted soon, I got some real crap on there i wanna delete.

I had similar problems switching an external drive between two computers, one with XP and the other with Vista. I had to do similar to above but instead of taking ownership I changed the security settings to basically let anybody to anything on the drive, otherwise Vista kept moaning all the time and producing endless pop up boxes saying permission denied etc. (I hate Vista).