How can I unlock an external disk?

I have two external disks, one connected to my Intel iMac via usb and the other firewire. Since upgrading to 10.6.7 and trying (unsuccessfully so far) to recover files from the back-up disk, I can no longer access them. I get the message " ...you don't have permission to see its contents". Access privileges have been changed to Custom, and it won't let me change this. In Disk Utility the drives are listed but 'Verify / Repair Permissions' buttons are greyed out. The disk icons have a small padlock attached to them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. Garry

Have you tried to fix the permissions from the Terminal?
If you open a Terminal Window
     Applications > Utilities > Terminal
assuming that your problematic disk is mounted
and type
ls -l /Volumes
you should see a listing of your disks, the permissions and the owner.
[Eliza:~] dreschle% ls -l /Volumes/
total 16
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root      admin     1 15 Jul 06:03 Eliza_HD -> /
drwxrwxr-x@ 20 root      admin   748 13 Jul 15:56 Eliza_Media
drwxrwxrwx 11 dreschle staff   442 10 Jul 17:30 HDDElizaBackup
drwxrwxr-x 49 dreschle staff 1734 10 Jul 17:30 HDDMediaPartition
drwx------@ 18 dreschle staff   680 15 Jul 08:56 Tresor
drwx------ 18 dreschle staff   986 11 Jul 18:15 dreschler
lrwxr-xr-x   1 dreschle admin    18 15 Jul 06:13 iDisk -> /Volumes/dreschler
for all disks, where you are the owner (your user name or admin), the protections should be "drwxrwxr-x" , which means that the system and you have read/write/execute access, everybody else only read/execute.
If you don't see read/write/execute permission to your disk, or are not even the owner
try
sudo chmod a+rwx /Volumes/theNameOfYourDisk
This will give read/write/access to everybody, so be sure to set it back with "repair permissions", after you have access your disk.
If you are even not the owner of the disk try to fix that with the "chown" command.
see:
man chown

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http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1451
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Hi.
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Hi,
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loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,
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Kind Regards,
Boxing Boom

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