> have you tried running the life cd first?

I did, and didn't run into these problems. At that point, the
filesystems were all NTFS

> I should advise to run the 32bit version first
> you didn't wrote anything about your system ,cpu.. ram

It's an athlon 64 bit dual core, 2G ram, reasonably high end machine.
The drive in question is a western digital 500G.

What I know is that the drive keeps getting set to read only.
What I suspect is that this is because of errors.
But the drive passes the factory diagnostics 100%.
So, I don't see why it's getting set to RO, or why it's so
interminably slow. Copy 1G? that will take hours, and it is very
unlikely to complete.