Help! Can't boot from SD clone and my HD is about to die

[TyTy]

It went through the process. Prepared the disk etc. Then it failed when it started writing the files.

[dnanian]

That would imply that the FireWire drive itself is having problems, which would agree with what we're seeing in the verbose boot, too...

[TyTy]

Could the problem be just with the partition? It would be a real pain to have to rip nearly 1000 CDs again?

[dnanian]

Could be. Hard to tell, unfortunately.

[TyTy]

Been away for a couple of days. I fixed my issue.

What I did was use iPartition to delete the partition I was cloning to and then create a new partition. I then tried cloning to this new partition and everything seems to be working as expected. All apps launch alright and all the bits and bobs appear to be in the right places.

I think the problem I was having had something to do with permissions that couldn't be fixed the normal way, even by the almighty DiskWarrior.

[dnanian]

That doesn't seem likely, but as long as it's working it's hard to argue with success.

[TyTy]

Well, in Disk Utility I could verify the disk alright but when I tried to verify or repair permissions I kept getting the "failure on exit" error, so it seemed to me that the problem lay in the permissions table of the partition.

Disk Warrior did find several problems with the table and attempted to rebuild it but I kept getting the same issue when trying to boot into the clone, so I thought I'd just delete the partition and its table with it. I have no problem booting into the clone now and all works just fine.

[dnanian]

It sounds more like the drive was damaged under the data, and deleting/recreating the partition moved things around a bit.