Restore to an erased drive?

[devo]

Oh I see.

Yes, the Smart Updates were done with "Backup all files".

And when I backed up the things that had changed, all I did was manually copy them to the other partition on the external (it was just a few photo-sets and documents). So the clone backup I have now is still my last working 10.3.9 backup. Whew!

[dnanian]

Good. Phew is right!

[devo]

Hi Dave and everyone...

Well, it was a no go last night. The trick of the keypress did prevent the computer from sleeping (Shift didn't seem to work, but the space bar did). But Restore still stopped at just under 50% progress. I let it go for a while even after it was obvious it had stopped, but after it didn't move for 1.5 hours, I gave up. At that point, there was a lot of CD-drive activity, but little else.

I guess my next best bet is to do a clean install of 10.3.4? I'm curious though - in this post http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=542, which seems a similar problem to mine, OneMatchFire says he finally was able to Restore when he "ran Disk Util from a newly installed version of 10.3" instead of the CD. Can you restore onto the hard drive on which disk utility is installed? It doesn't seem like you could, or maybe I'm misreading.

At this point, that would ideal. Otherwise, I'm looking at a lot of time upgrading and reinstalling programs. Though I will get a squeaky clean OS.

Either way - I still haven't lost any of my info (knock on wood). I still thank god I got Super Duper!

(Thanks, once again, for all the help so far and still to come).

[dnanian]

Sounds like the drive might even be overheating, devo -- your situation is definitely different than OneMatchFire's.

What I'd probably suggest at this point is to upgrade to Tiger and use its Migration Assistant to pull over the data. It'll copy less that way, and you might get it all off before the drive overheats.

I'd also seriously consider selling this USB drive on eBay or something and getting a good FireWire drive!

[devo]

Ah, you read my mind, Dave.

It does seem like the perfect time to finally get Tiger, as long as I'm working with a blank drive and spending so much time on it - it shouldn't all be in vain. Plus, as you say, Tiger's migration will make it all that much easier. Not to mention, I just need my computer back!

And, whether it's this specific drive or not, I also think everything is telling me that I should get a FireWire drive. I might even keep the USB as a redundant backup (if I wasn't paranoid about data-loss before - which I was - now I really am!).

So thanks again for all your help. I really appreciate it.


Devo

[dnanian]

No problem, Devo. Here's hoping it works out.