May you never have this experience

[David Roth weiss]

Wayne,

Every professional should absolutely have a system clone on standby at all times. And, each and every time you update your software you should clone your present working system drive before installing the upgrade, just in case its one of those funky upgrades that every so often gets distributed before its really ready for the masses.

In your present case you would have been covered, the support techs could have done their thing without any worries and you would have been unconcerned about losing any of your apps, plugins, or data. Use this as a learning experience…

DRW

[Tony]

Wayne,

I feel your pain but can offer this comfort.

Download Carbon Copy Cloner and use it religiously to make a clone of your boot drive complete with all your applications, files, user pref’s etc etc.

CCC will save you time and time again when you have a need to start up again without having to reassemble all those precious app’s and files.

Do a google search for Carbon Copy Cloner and download it for free.

Good luck,

Tony Salgado

ps- Apple care is wonderful for hearing them say repeatly “did you trash your preferences?

[Tony]

Wayne,

I feel your pain but can offer this comfort.

Download Carbon Copy Cloner and use it religiously to make a clone of your boot drive complete with all your applications, files, user pref’s etc etc.

CCC will save you time and time again when you have a need to start up again without having to reassemble all those precious app’s and files.

Do a google search for Carbon Copy Cloner and download it for free.

Good luck,

Tony Salgado

ps- Apple care is wonderful for hearing them say repeatly “did you trash your preferences?

[Tony]

Wayne,

I feel your pain but can offer this comfort.

Download Carbon Copy Cloner and use it religiously to make a clone of your boot drive complete with all your applications, files, user pref’s etc etc.

CCC will save you time and time again when you have a need to start up again without having to reassemble all those precious app’s and files.

Do a google search for Carbon Copy Cloner and download it for free.

Good luck,

Tony Salgado

ps- Apple care is wonderful for hearing them say repeatly “did you trash your preferences?

[Lee Berger]

I can’t remember what happened, but Carbon Copy Cloner failed me a year ago so I switched to SuperDuper. It’s not free, but it has worked flawlessly.

[David Roth weiss]

I also use Carbon Copy Cloner and I always make sure to test the clones I create with it to insure that they do boot — a clone that doesn’t boot is worthless. I have only had one clone using Carbon Copy Cloner that failed to boot, and that was because I failed to erase the target drive before cloning, which should always be the first step.

DRW

[Rj Miles]

If your crashing comes back, I suggest asking Apple for (2) new processors and a logic board.

I had a similar issue with my G5 dual 2.0ghz PowerMac. All I had to do was move the PowerMac around a little bit, and something changed just enough for it to run a couple of minutes, hours or days, but eventually it began crashing again.

Since the new processors and logic board, the G5 has been a perfect machine, knock on wood.

I concur on USING something like CCC or SuperDuper. I have had CCC for awhile, but picked up SuperDuper so I could more easily back up production HDs to removable SATA external HDs.

We all feel your pain of having to begin a new, but let it be a serious lesson. 🙂

I would hold onto your SATA card until you are ready to move up to a multi-channel solution like the Sonnet X4P, which reduces the number of data cables while increasing the total number of external HDs to (24).

[Bill Lee]

“Apple Pro Training Series: Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System”
http://www.peachpit.com/title/0321268717

Contains a lot of the stuff that you need to know about setting up, maintaining, and recovering after problems with Final Cut Pro.

As a general rule, I try to run standard as much as possible, since unless you write down every tweak that you do, you’ll never remember it months or years later.

If you have the original disk, using Migration Assistant can make most of your applications and tweaks return. You can run it at any time and create a ‘new’ user login that has a lot of the stuff from the old as well move many of the applications to your ‘new’ computer.

I’d agree with many of the posters: an alternate boot drive configured and ready to go makes disaster recovery much easier, as well as being useful for troubleshooting problems with your existing system.

Bill Lee

[Bob Cole]

[billlee] “an alternate boot drive configured and ready to go”

Could you tell us how you’ve set this up, and DRW, explain how you boot from this drive? Is this alt. boot drive part of an external hard drive unit?

It sounds like a great idea. Are both SuperDuper and CCC Intel-Mac-ready?

— Bob C

[Bill Lee]

At the moment, I’m using a PowerBook to edit, and so it has to be an external drive. I carry around bunch of 2.5″ FireWire drives that I use as storage, as well as having larger 3.5″ FireWire drives while working in one place. I’m currently working only with DV, but have used other formats in the past on desktop Macs.

I usually duplicate bootable drives using the Restore function of Disk Utility, but also use the command line utility ASR as well as CCC. What’s most frustrating with all of these programs is the occasional failure to copy, which repeated attempts to copy won’t fix. Sometimes these can be resolved by repairing the disk that is refusing to copy, at other times it won’t. I discovered that disk corruption of some files may be causing a copy attempt to fail – and found that if you do a drag copy of the disk in question, you should discover which files are preventing the copy from proceeding. Trash those particular files – they are already corrupted anyway and can’t be fixed – and redo a Restore in Disk Utility. A drag-copied version of a boot disk is not usable as a boot drive, but it can be used to work out which files are creating problems with that copy.

docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303124 is a list of the start-up keys for Intel-Macs, and you can see that the Option key held down will still allow you to temporarily boot from an alternate boot disk, same as the PowerPC-based Macs.

I don’t know about SuperDuper, but the developer of CCC says that it will work under Rosetta emulation.

If I had some disks mounted internally, I would either set up a disk as an alternate boot disk, or partition one of those disks as a bootable volume. Since it is there mainly for emergencies and testing, it doesn’t have to be as fast as the regular boot disk (but it would be better if it is). It will depend on the media you are regularly using as to what is adequate as an alternate boot drive for longer periods. Since software problems are more likely to cause system failures (as long as you replace your drives every few years), a drive partitioned into two should be able to have two bootable volumes on the one disk, but with the risk that a hardware drive failure can make both of them useless.

Bill Lee