No access to other drives

I have just had a problem. On booting my mac pro it would not accept my password. I selected the spare admin user and reset the password but it would not do this. I booted from the install disc and tried resetting the password but it said it was reset but wasn't. So I created a new user and copied all the stuff over after taking ownership of it.

The computer booted and I got access to the stuff in the user account which I then saved to an ext drive. Restarting however would not work again and I ended up with a endless restart, running circle, black screen, restart cycle.....

I booted in TARGET mode using my macbook pro and could access the root drive but the other 3 drives were all locked. I could not take ownership of them. If I click on the padlock in info and type my password then I can click on the owner list but the third icon along the bottom which normally lets you run a recursive permission change is greyed out.

I have had no choice but re install the root drive using the save settings option and I now have everything working again BUT the same problem persists on the other drives! These other drives are my backups and time machine! I have a backup from 2 weeks ago but have still lost a lot of stuff if I cannot get access to these drives.

Any ideas......