[ncmphoto]

I've been having some problems with my boot drive recently (G4 MDD/OSX 10.5.8) involving slowdowns - beachballs, apps very slow to launch, etc.) after the Mac has been running for a while. I've run Disk Utility - says boot drive is OK - permissions repair, applejack, Disk Warrior (only one icon flag to fix), Hardware Test (came up clean). Another symptom is that the external FireWire backup drive sometimes shows up as a boot option and sometimes does not, when booting with the Option key held down. When it's there, it does boot normally and seems to run fine. Also, twice when rebooting from my main boot drive the desktop appeared but the menubar and other stuff didn't. After a reboot it seemed to be working normally.

I have a 2nd internal hd where I had a backup of my older OSX 10.4.11 system (before ugrading to Leopard about a month ago). Since the external was behaving a bit weirdly I used SD to erase and do a complete backup of the boot drive, but it hung about 3/4 of the way through. Numbers and progress bar didn't change. So I quit that process and used DU to reformat the drive, ran DU on the boot drive (no problems) then ran SD again. It finished copying but now is hanging on the last step - restoring Spotlight state on the clone. Is it ok to quit SD and will the backup drive be bootable (that part and the prebinding did finish)?

BTW I'm running SD when booted with my login items disabled and not doing anything else on that Mac while backing up.

I suspect that I've gotta reinstall 10.5.8 on the boot drive and restore my stuff using Migration Assistant, but though I have two backups, I am not sure they will work when needed.