Hey Allan, Launch Disk Utility and while you are looking at the two buttons for repair and verify permissions within the first aid window, note the text above which says it can only repair permissions on a boot drive. I always construed this as "the boot drive". However, I have since learned that you can repair permissions on any "OS X bootable drive", not just the one you started up from. It is totally appropriate to repair permissions using Disk Utility on your startup drive without having to boot from CD or another bootable drive.
Your crashing problems while attempting to repair would lead me to believe that your permissions problems were either quite severe or you may have other problems which still haven't been fixed. I would be running fsck -y in single user mode or booting from an OS 9 Disk Warrior CD and performing a directory check just to make sure. Ward Oldham on 10/20/2002 10:06 AM, Allan Atherton at aatherton at insightbb.com wrote: > I was unaware of permissions maintenance in OSX until I heard it should be > done with Disk Utility. I tried running DU's Repair Permissions from my boot > drive and it always crashed half-way through. Then I read that you had to > run it from another system or the Installer CD. > So I booted from the Jaguar CD, found Disk Utility in the pull down menu, > selected my OS 10.2.1 partition, and ran Repair Permissions. It took a long > time and found a lot of permissions to correct. Nice to know. Maybe bad > permissions were the cause of an application crashing once or twice a month > in the past year. > Allan Atherton > > > The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be October 22 > For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of > activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>. > The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be October 22 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
