Restore to an erased drive?

[devo]

Hello all. Well, it looks like I purchased my external drive and Super Duper at just the right time. Not three or four weeks after purchasing them and backing up, I have lost everything on my laptop. Thank god for Super Duper!

Anyway, here's my adventure and problems, maybe someone out there can offer some advice. I think my problem is a bit like these:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=747
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=542

but not quite... ?

So, for some unknown reasons, I turned on my Powerbook the other day, only to not be able to get it to boot (some bad shareware, I think). Luckily, I was able to Archive-and-Install back to OS X 10.3.4, and boot up. At this point, I also backed up the few things since the last full backup. However, I noticed a few odd things and a couple error messages about missing files, so I decided to restore from the backup, figuring that was easier than the several upgrades back to 10.3.9 and at the same time rolling back to a fully working system.

Like the second post above, though, Restore seemed to freeze about halfway through (which I thought may be because the external went to sleep when the laptop did - is there no way to disable sleep during Restore?). In any case, this gave me a non-bootable internal drive. So I then erased the internal, and tried again last night to Restore to it, though after several hours I myself had to sleep, and it slept, and this morning was frozen again.

So. My question is - is this the best way to go about this? Can I Restore to a blank drive, following the Restore instructions in the Super Duper manual? And if so, how can I get it to not sleep during Restore, which seems to terminate the process?

Or am I better off reinstalling OS X, updating to 10.3.9, and moving everything back onto the "new" system? And in that scenario, will I have to reinstall everything or does Panther have a "migrate" function?


My tech info:

15" Powerbook 1.5 GHz 512 ram 80 Gb
OS X 10.3.9 (with an install CD for 10.3.4)
External LaCie 250 Gb USB drive (I wish I had known the distinct advantage of Firewire at this point - ie, bootable - but alas)
Full backup clone, via Super Duper, on separate parition of external drive

Thanks in advance for your help!


Devo