Need to test files and folders for accessibility
 

I'm trying to tar a drive and it's hanging when it gets to a certain folder and there are probably a few more of them but I don't know howto test each folder on the drive to be able to put it in an exclude file so i can tar without having to reboot the computer ...

if you mean you want to see who's got read/write permissions to some files or directories, you can use terminal:

ls -l /path/to/file

or, for directories

ls -ld /path/to/directory

and it should show you permissions.