File permissions issue?

This is going to be a little long winded I apologize in advance.

This problem has me stumped. I recently had a windows 7 crash and it happened while my external hard drive was plugged in now for what ever reason after I reinstalled windows some of the files on my external wont let me access them.

It's two folders in particular... My videos folder and pictures folders. Everything else I have full rights to and can move them and edit them as I wish. Now the video folder I can watch the vids but I cant alter them and the pictures folder wont even let me in. I've tried to change permissions and take ownership but it comes back with errors for every file inside the folder saying how it's unable to change the permissions for the individual files.

After that I can access the folder and then see the files, but I can't look at or alter them... Here is the pain in the @$$ part... I can then go through each file and change the permissions individually, but I have hundreds of files and that could take a very long time...

SO now that the explanation is over I need help here. Is there anything I can do that will allow me to bypass permissions or at least let me change them in larger groups?
I'm running windows 7 64bit and its a 1TB western digital external drive. I can provide more info as needed.

 

Greetings, cerras13, and welcome to MajorGeeks...

I had a roughly similar problem as yours recently and my customer did the 'outside of the box' thinking for me: he asked why couldn't he boot to a Linux disk, transfer the files to a flash drive, and then create a new folder in the new Windows installation (his was Vista) and re-transfer the files? Sounded good to me, that's what he did, and everything was kosher...

So, since you've already gone the normal route with ownership and permissions - why not try the Linux with your machine? Grab a a Linux distro (Mint, Puppy and Ubuntu are all nice and easy). Download the .iso file and burn that file as an image to a CD/DVD (ImgBurn and InfraRecorder are good free .iso burning programs if you don't already have one).

A quick tutorial for the image burning process using ImgBurn is located here.

Then boot to that disk and run the OS as a live environment (in other words, don't install it - just run it from the optical drive). You should then be able to access and manipulate the data.