WD drive permissions

A couple of weeks ago a software upgrade screwed up my Mac profile, I upgraded to Mojave to see if that would solve the issue and it didn't, meaning the only fix was to completely rebuild a new profile. Unfortunately the permissions are not transferring over for my Western Digital External Hard Drive for Mac (formatted Mac OS Extended - Journaled). I’ve added the new profile as a user on the drive, given it read and write privileges and tried “apply to enclosed items” both from the old OSX profile and new one, but it’s not updating all the internal files and folders, which means that some are inaccessible, other folders appear empty when they’re not etc. I’ve used Disk Utilities to no avail either. I really need to be able to access this drive and the content on it fully. I contacted WD support and they've told me this is a mac software and permissions error and that I need to get support from here instead. Any help much appreciated.