Some unreadable contents

I have a 100 GB external hard disk that was plugged to the PC when I reinstalled openSuse 11.1. It appears on the Gnome desktop as two devices: a 21.5 GB media and a 76.4 GB media.

In the Properties tabs they are described as follows:

Basic > Name: 21.5 GB media
Type: folder(inode/directory)
Contents: 137,619 items, totaling 2.8 GB
(some contents unreadable)
Free space: 15.4 GB
4.2 GB used
Total capacity: 19.7 GB
Filesystem type: ext3

Permissions > The permissions of “disk-1” could not be determined.

Volume > Mount options: rw nosuid nodev errors=continue barrier= 1 data=ordered

Basic > Name: 76.4 GB media
Type: folder(inode/directory)
Contents: 8 items, totaling 49.0 GB
(some contents unreadable)
Free space: 66.3 GB
3.7 GB used
Total capacity: 70.0 GB
Filesystem type: ext3

Permissions > The permissions of “disk-1” could not be determined.

Volume > Mount options: rw nosuid nodev errors=continue barrier= 1 data=ordered

Is there any way of being able to access and recover the unreadable contents? Your valuable insight will be highly regarded.