Resolved External Drive with custom permissions?

[Joel95]

External Drive is not accessible, has custom permissions, reverts back to custom whenever I try to change it.

Also, Disk Utility is taking 3 hours to fix permissions on my Mac. I have no idea how to fix this and I have already restored it from time machine once because of the permissions, system extension and startup problems. It seems that the problems are creeping back in.

 

[Joel95]

After much research, I've found that a lot of people were able to solve the first issue by using "sudo chflags" command.
Is this wise? And how would i use this command? Some people use it with forward slashes, some don't.

I am using Mac OSX 10.6.7