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Repair Disk Permissions

File permissions may get corrupted when applications quit unexpectedly, your system freezes or crashes, after power outages, and after installing third-party applications from .pkg files. Wrong file permissions may cause some applications, especially those that come with Mac OS X or other system software to behave strangely or stop working entirely.

If any of your applications aren't working or exhibiting problems, try repairing disk permissions. This checks the permissions of Mac OS X system files and Apple software installed from .pkg installers, and repairs them if they're wrong.

To repair disk permissions on your system disk:

  1. Choose System > Repair Disk Permissions.

You can also repair disk permissions on other hard disk partitions, network volumes, external disks and memory sticks.

To repair disk permissions on other disks:

  1. Choose Disk Utility.
  2. Choose the disk on which you want to repair permissions.
  3. Choose Repair Volume.

See also

System Tasks