Cannot Repair Permissions on External Hard Drives

I have a WD 2TB FireWire 800 hard drives (X3), and all are formated Mac OS Extended (Journaled). When I restarted my computer, I noticed my TM gave me an error message that the drive I selected for TM was locked. After further investigation, I could see that all my WD externals had listed Cutom for Privileges. Since I am an Administrator, I unlocked each vloume with my password, and attempted to change the Privileges back to Read + Write, but they kept changining back to Custom. One of the volumes is unchecked Ignore ownership on this volume, but all three volumes are acting the same. Is there any way I can recover my data and repair my privilges on all three volums? In Disk Repair, repair permisions is grayed out. I have not used the Terminal enough, but with the right assistance I will give it a shot.