Permissions Issue; cant access a partitioned part of my HDD or my iDisk

Question

I've been having a few issues with permissions sharing files between my Mac Book and iMac, I recently reset the permissions to read/write for myself including all sub-folders on my HDD. Having done this I now cannot access a partitioned part of my HDD or my iDisk!
When I try I get a "Folder XXX can't be opened because you don't have permission to see its contents"
When I go to "get info" and look at the permissions they all read "custom". When I change them to read/write they go back to custom. I've tried repairing permissions in Disk Utility, booted from the instillation DVD and tried the Disk Utility again, also the Reset Passwords option but still no access!
Can anyone help?

Answer 1

It would seem you've really gotten the permissions messed up. Here's a rather involved process for getting all the permissions reset for the entire HDD hierarchy.
Startup into Single User Mode: How to Startup into Single User Mode. When startup finishes you should have a black screen with white type ending with a prompt. Enter these commands and press RETURN after each one:
mount -uw /
chown root:admin /
chmod 1775 /
reboot
After rebooting open the Terminal application to set the following directory permissions. You can paste these lines or enter by hand, but be careful to enter them correctly.
sudo su
Password: [Enter your admin password when prompted.]
chown root:admin /Applications
chmod 0775 /Applications
chown root:admin /Library
chmod 1775 /Library
chown root:admin /System
chmod 0775 /System
chown root:admin /Users
chmod 0775 /Users
chmod -R -N /Applications
chown -R :admin /Applications/*
chown -R `id -un`:`id -gn` ~
Now restart the computer.