I am now in the process of doing a completely clean system install on my external drive for my Mac. After that I will semi-manually start transferring everything over from my internal drive. (OK, maybe I’ll use the Migration Assistant for some stuff.) But I’ll have to do tons of stuff from scratch. Wish me luck, I may be offline for awhile. (And of course my webcam and the wiki will be down while this is in progress.)

Now, I don’t actually no for sure that my recent woes are because of my iunternal drive having issues, or that they are because of years of cruft built up through multiple OS upgrades using the upgrade process rather than archive and install or clean installs. But I’m willing to give it a try and see what it does.

Also, when recovering from my mail meltdown I found that one version (I had several) of a mailbox file from October 1999 was corrupted. That original mailbox file could not have been more than a few hundred meg max, but the system now thought it was 33 Gig. And when I try to open the folder… or empty the trash with the folder in the trash… Finder chugs for an hour or two then crashes and restarts with nothing done. It did let me COPY the directory though, so now I have 66 Gig of unusable messed up directory. And I know I have other copies of the content that was in that now messed up directory. So I’m not too concerned about it. But I couldn’t figure out a way to kill it in a way that didn’t make me nervous given that at the moment I have no recent backup of my system.

So, although I guess it may be overkill, I guess reinstalling the whole system on a new hard drive and then copying everything EXCEPT the corrup directory might do the trick. :-)

We shall see. As I type (on another computer obviously) the initial system install is about 30% done. After it comes up I then will migrate my relevant content and settings, then reinstall needed applications, then start working on getting the webcam and wiki and such all operating again… this could take quite awhile. I am starting early Saturday to allow the worst case of this taking all weekend. I hope that will not be the case.

Bleh. And then if I end up continuing to run on the external drive for the semi-long-term, I’ll probably snag a second external drive to to backups too. Cause I’m not sure I’d want to backup back into the external drive even if I could.

If I get this all working though, at some point I might try reformatting the external drive then restoring back onto it to see if that works smoothly again or not. (Separating out the possible bad drive issue from the crufty upgrade on top of upgrade potential issue… I’ve done nothing but upgrade installs since OS 9… well… and one system migration to a new machine as well I guess… so maybe only the last upgrade really counts… but whatever.)

Anyway, wish me luck. :-)