safety clone and plists
 

In trying to solve a sleep problem (with 10.4.2), I trashed my powermanagement plist in Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration, and it didn't rebuild it on startup. Could that have anything to do with the fact that I'm booting from a safety clone? If so, should I not be messing with plists on the clone?

The powermanagement.plist is in the "system" area, and as such is isolated from that on your main drive. It should be rebuilt when necessary, but not necessarily on boot: you may have to make changes to the Preference Pane to get a new one written.

The Safety Clone will help to isolate that file, but it won't prevent it from being created... in fact, /Library/Preferences looks, on a Safety Clone, just like a "regular" system's /Library/Preferences. Nothing special.