[Tricia]

I wonder if this is a common problem? I re-partitioned my external drive (Lacie Porsche Design 500GB USB 2/Firewire - about 4 years old but rarely used) and then used SuperDuper! to create a full bootable clone. I have a late 2008 aluminium unibody MacBook which doesn't have a firewire port so it took 4 1/2 hours using the USB2 cable.

When the backup was finished I got a message "... and finally reboot from the backup" and then, from memory, another message saying that boot caches had to be updated before rebooting. That was more than an hour ago and the screen has been 'frozen' with my desktop image ever since.

I'm assuming that the backup may be faulty and the reason I backed up was so I could do an erase and install from 10.5.8 to Snow Leopard using the 10.6.3 installation disc that I've had sitting around for some months now.

Obviously, I don't want to proceed if I don't have a functioning, bootable backup.

Is my only option here to power off the MacBook, try running SuperDuper again and see if I encounter the same problem? At least, if I do an incremental backup this time it should take considerably less than 4 1/2 hours (I hope). I'm also planning to do a Time Machine backup on a second partition of the external drive but I would like to know that my SuperDuper! backup is bootable before I continue with anything else.

It's just after midnight here now so I'll check back in about 6 hours time to see if anyone has responded.

Cheers
Tricia