SuperDuper! backup hangs at grey screen

[ericmazur]

I've been trying for a week now to boot from backups made with SD, to no avail. Each time my machine hangs at the grey screen with the Apple. This morning I patiently waited 30 minutes. The little wheel below the grey Apple keeps spinning.

Here are my details:

17" MBP 2.33 GHz Core 2 duo
3 Gb Ram
300 Gb Fujitsu internal drive
firmware password ON
OS 10.5.1
SD 2.1.4 (v82)

Backup drive: identical 300 Gb Fujitsu drive as internal disk. GUID partition map.

I tried two enclosures: WiebeTech FW800/eSata enclosure (using the FW800 cable) and a Coolgear USB 2.0 enclosure.

I have successfully booted from a clean install on the USB 2.0 enclosure, so it can't be a hardware problem.

I repaired permissions on both the original and the backup. No difference.

For some reason the backup drive does show some normally hidden folders (var, etc, dev and so on). Also, the number of files reported by Disk Utility is not the same on the original (a difference of about 120 files). But this could be normal given that SuperDuper does not copy many cache and index files.

I've recreated a clean backup twice -- same result.

Tonight I'm going to try backing up with Carbon Copy Cloner and see what happens. In the meantime, I'd appreciate any feedback!