What have I done to my poor external hard drive?!

So I recently had to replace my hard drive in my macbook and after the rather stressful process of recovering most of my files through an online service called carbonite, I realized that more than half of my itunes library was gone and that several of my programs like Microsoft Office or Skype were still missing. I am always paranoid about losing my files so I also have a Verbatim external hard drive which I plugged in and found what I think is the rest of my itunes as well as Word and Powerpoint and whatnot. I was able to load most of my programs back onto my computer, but when I went to add my music, I was told that I "didn't have permission to write to Macintosh HD." What? I also found that every time I tried to trash something, I had to type in my password, and my iphoto library wouldn't open. I tried to figure out what was wrong by searching online but I ended up messing everything up even more! It was painful! Now I've managed to repair most of the weirdness that I had to deal with but now my hard drive has a little padlock on the icon and when I try to open it, I get a message that reads: "The folder “VERBATIM” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents." Why can't I get into it???
Wow, that's a lot. If there is anything I need to clarify about info on my mac to get an answer, let me know. I really have no idea what to do at this point! I live kinda far away from any apple store so I want to try to fix this on my own and I'm not even sure if apple would help me since Verbatim isn't actually an apple product (though I bought it there.) And if a solution can be found, I need rather detailed instructions... I'm obviously not very computer savy! Thanks!!

Go to System Preferences > Displays > Display tab > scroll the resolution list to the bottom > select the bottom most entry.  (If your on Snow Leopard).
If you're on Lion it's the topmost entry.
Regards,
Captfred

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