My experience says most people do ok in those areas. You just plan for it better. You dress appropriately (flannel or quilted lining pants, sweaters, fleeces, etc), you start your car 5 minutes before going to it, so it's warmed up, etc. It's just a matter of what you expect.
http://www.winthefight.org/savageman/
Savageman apparently has a brutal hill climb. If you make it up the big hill without putting your feet down, you get your name on a brick in the road.
last story she read said it was his friend's car, and paul was the passenger. Not sure what the relationship of this was to the charity event, but he'd apparently been giving people rides as part of that event.
There's no telling what the permissions are if you copied them from an NTFS partition. I'd run "repair permissions" against them. Or, from a terminal window, sudo chown -R yourusername /Volumes/drive, in addition to the chflags -R nouchg
There have also been reports of problems with I believe western digital software that was bundled with some external drives, but I have no idea if that's what's impacting you. I've never seen your symptoms before.