Disk Utility works forever at trying to repair partitions My computer froze yesterday while I was using a browser. I restarted and never got past a plain white screen. Finally was able to boot from a different drive and ran disk utility on my main boot drive and it made some repairs and then gave me the message "Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required."
The status bar shows it is in process and I get the message Estimated time: 2 minutes. But nothing happens. I stopped it after 20 min. and had to force quit to shut down disk utility. Then I had to restart because the finder crashed and didn't come back. Restarted to the alternate disk again, ran disk utility on the main drive again, it found some problems and repaired them this time (last time it didn't find any) and now it's back to the "2 minute" updating boot support again... now onto 20 minute with no progress.

Any ideas on what to do next? Do I need to buy a new hard drive and migrate my files (which appear to be intact)? This is a TB drive with 800 gigs used... a lot of it for applications so reinstalling everything would eat my life and be virtually impossible. Any ideas on making the boot support partitions update so I don't have to go through that hell?
Disk Utility repair functions are (from what I have heard) just a front end to FSCK, so that will likely give you the same results. You could try another disk repair utility (diskWarrior, techtool, etc...), or if you have a recent backup I would be tempted to wipe the drive and start over.

If you have another Mac you could put that Mac into target disk mode, connect the two via Firewire or Thunderbolt and try the repair that way.

It is possible that the drive itself is damaged and beyond repair. The problem here is that disk utility is usually not smart enough to know when to give up. And repairs can take a long time (overnight is not unheard of) so unrecoverably damaged disks often initially diagnose similar to what you are seeing.

Failing other disk utilities or other Macs your best bet might be a visit to an Apple Genius. they will diagnose you for free, repairs may cost you if you are out of warranty.