Why does my MBP get the grey screen after backing up to external hard drive???

(firstly, i'm a complete moron on terminal, though i managed to unlock the external HD. i appreciate the simplicity of mac, i.e. a moron in many ways.)
for some bizarre reason, every time i copy files to the external HD, i end up with a lock on the external HD and the dreaded spinning grey screen when i restart the MBP. i've managed to get rid of the grey screen by reinstalling with the snow leopard DVD without formatting, but this is obviously not practical. am i doing something wrong??
the last time i did this, i dragged my "user" files. then i dragged my entire internal HD into a folder created in my external HD. i've done this with my powerbook and older OS without issues, but OS 10.5 and 10.6 don't seem to work without ending up with the spinning grey screen and a lock on the HD.
thanks in advance for your input. (and please keep it simple...)

no, but it's definitely not due to a corrupt external drive. this happened with two different brands of drives. the first time with a lacie, i thought my MBP hard drive was damaged, but it was determined that a reinstall was all it needed. the same thing happened with an OWC. they both work fine. there seems to be some kind of a permission problem which gets screwed up somwhere.

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