Repair permissions problem

[mikel1291979]

Im sick of googling without any correct results so I figured I would ask here.
Im running os x 10.6.6 on my MBP. Intel 2.4 core 2 duo, 4 gigs ddr3 and 320g 7200 rpm hdd. My computer hangs up doing the simplest of things. Sometimes I cant even click on a page on this site without getting the beach ball for 10 to 20 seconds. Youtube has become a dirty word and I havent evened opened photoshop in a while.
The only way to speed things up is to repair disk permissions. When I open disk utility I have my harddrive listed, then underneath I have untitled. I can repair permissions on both although I have no idea why I am repairing permissions on 2 drives when I only have one.
This fix works for a few days then it starts slowing down again. I have to then repair permissions again. Any body have this problem before and know how to fix it? At this point I am thinking of a new harddrive.

[René Damkot]

Top "drive" is the physical HDD.
Second is the partition.

See here: The WDC has 1 partition, the LaCie has 2 partitions:

https://img.skitch.com/20110321-xy755w2bn5tbu77yd7e5ayreuq.jpg

If you need to repair permissions that often, and it actually helps, something is wrong.

You could have a look in the activity monitor what the machine is doing when it stalls, or look in the console log for errors.
Beachball could be low memory, but with 4Gb you shouldn't see that often.

Alternatively, download Onyx (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx) and see if that helps.

[mikel1291979]

Thank you for explaining that. I have been using onyx for a couple of weeks, but it doesn't help. Also I have tried looking at the activity monitor and I get the beach ball when it is using less than 15% of my memory. I took it to the apple store about a month ago and he ran it through some tests, passed all of them, then he repaired permissions and the computer ran great. I couldn't get it to hang and I even launched about 20 apps all at once and it opened them all very fast. I don't understand what is wrong.

[Hen3Ry]

If we look at Rene's image, and compare it to what you see, are they the same?

By this I mean your window shows something like:


?? Seagate 320 Drive Description (where ?? is a disk icon)
?? Untitled

And the drive icon that appears on your desktop is also named Untitled?

[mikel1291979]

It lists my wd hard drive then under it shows untitled. I don't have the hard drive on my desktop. In finder it lists the untitled drive but not the wd drive.