In a Pickle - ways to avoid the nuclear restore option
 

Dave - huge fan of your product and I promote it shamelessly all over the net and in our company.

That said, I'm here to ask your advice - something I haven't had to do to this point because your product works so intuitively and ... works! I am humbled for any light you can shed on my best options.

I'm in a bit of a pickle. Here is the short version of the story:

-spilled coffee on my 2.4 dual core MacBookPro... BRILLIANT!

-immediately shut down, vacuumed and dried

-on restart the next day, it worked but keyboard was shot - external keyboard worked fine - at this point i said "i should do my backup - fast"

-Backing up with SD! gave me the i/o errors.. frustratingly, i get 90% of the way there before it fails. I searched all over this forum, and found that likely I have bad data on my disk based on yours and others posts (duh, right? water + electronics).

-I did a full disk repair, booted from install CD... the works (same problem)

-Bought and ran Socks... (same problem)

-Bought and ran DiskWarrior (confirms - some system files are hosed... not good eh?)

-Now the keyboard is starting to act up, some keys just constantly repeat... so my time is running out.

***NOW THE GOOD NEWS***

In the process of panicing, I've been able to (apparently) copy of the following to an external HD:

-Mail files (40GB) and settings
-iTunes folder
-Documents
-Photos
-Work Documents

In short... I'm "just" looking at a new keyboard, hard drive and a new clean install... BUT before I do that... are there any other options I should explore so I don't have to chase down installers, updaters...

What should I do next or... last before this nuclear option?

Would archive-and-reinstall be an idea worth persuing, or am I just going to get into more and more trouble trying to save the applications on this soggy hard drive?

Thanks!

-steve

What I'd probably do is take the drive out of the Mac, Steve, and dry it off. Put it in a FW case, and then -- after it's dry -- try to fix it with DW. If that doesn't work, clean install to the new Mac (or whatever you've got) and then *try* to migrate from the drive when prompted to copy "from another Mac". That'll skip the OS and might get stuff off. Worth a try.