Disaster Crash-need some help

[PhilBuckle]

What a night.
After reading a few posts about the benefits of disabling Spotlight I decided to gop ahead and turn it off.
I found some info on a Mac site that supplied the code to paste into the Terminal app. I pasted it in and my computer crashed immediately.
What an idiot!
My computer would not load the system from then on. It stops at the grey screen and the Fans come on full blast. Not good!
Because I use Time Machine I knew that if I could get the system up I should be ok.
I forced the CD tray open and inserted the Leopard install disc.
Ok I could now install a new system.
Did that and got into Time Machine and went back a few hors before the crash.
All good except now (because Time Machine can't replace everything in the system........especially the system itself) I am back at OSX 10.5.4 and I was at .6 before the crash.
So I download and install the 10.5.6 combo update.

Most things are running but my main problem is that PT will not find the Digi Hardware.
Now I do run a PPC Dual 2.7 and it does suffer from this almost everyday. That is it's a known problem with these machines. Most days I have to turn off and on only once and the hardware is found.
Maybe once a year it will take 3 restarts.

But no matter how many times I turn on and off or restart the hardware will not be found.
In fact the Core Audio Manager is saying "Unsupported Device" Not Connected (HW Not Found)
I don't remember the "Unsupported Device" ever coming up before but I may not have noticed it.
The first thing I do every morning is start Core Audio Manager to see if my hardware is recognized.

My next step would be to take the cards out and reseat them but I'm sure this is a software issue.
I then reinstalled PT8 cs3 and trashed all preferences and plsts. I trashed everything!

Still no dice.

Any suggestions as to where I go from here?

[PhilBuckle]

Well this is most definitely a software issue. I booted back to a Tiger System and the hardware is found.
Back in Panther and still no luck.

So I am disappointed in Time Machine. A true clone of my system would have fixed this in an instant. Lesson learned.

So now I will try a uninstall of PT and then clean install.

It's also taken out my Mail program. When I try to open certain emails they crash the program. About 40% of them. Time Machine did not help there either. I replaced everything to do with the mail program from a backup a month ago and still get the same crashes.
So it's obviously the new system. Go figure.
I even replaced the entire preferences folder. No joy.

Back to trouble shooting. What fun.
Not.

BTW thanks Andre for the tip. Zapping PRAM and resetting open firmware did not work unfortunately.

[TimNielsen]

I would highly suggest a program called Super Duper, and a clone drive. It will make a perfect mirror image, I update mine weekly, if on a firewire drive, you can boot from it and just restore back your internal hard drive.

Time Machine is great for files and versions and whatnot, but yes, as you found, it doesn't take the place of a good clone!

[PhilBuckle]

Thanks Tim I'll take your advice.
So I carefully made copies of all my Digi related files and did a safe uninstall.
Of course now I have to re download PT8 before I can do the updates.

I forgot it's 4 gig!!

[PhilBuckle]

All fixed. What a waste of time!

It was the safe uninstall and reinstall of PT8 that fixed it in the end.

Just bought Super Duper. When I'm 100% happy I'll make a clone.

No more playing with the Terminal for me.

My mail program is still toast but I'll get to that another day!

[c-tone]

Glad you are up and running again.

I don't think there is a big benefit from turning off Spotlight anyway, and losing the benefits of having it turned on isn't worth any minor performance improvements, from what I have seen. Spotlight is very useful in finding files, which can save you a lot of time and headaches.

I agree that it is generally best not to mess with Terminal - again not worth the risk if you aren't absolutely sure what you are doing. There are usually free or shareware programs that can do most of these tasks more safely - such as Spotless for controlling Spotlight.

Carbon Copy Cloner is another great disk cloning program, again shareware.

[drenkrom]

If you have to copy/paste stuff into the Terminal, you really shouldn't be there in the first place. Even with my Unix/Linux experience, I tread very lightly in there.

You found out the hard way that TimeMachine is not really a complete backup. It is a backup of your system's state, but not of the system itself. If you'd reinstalled your system, reinstalled your software and then run Time Machine, you may have been successful after repairing permissions. Maybe. The clone is clearly the best solution. Live and learn...

I once tested disk performance with and without Spotlight, to determine if I should do that on all the systems here. The gains were absolutely negligeable, less than 3% on read/write cycles. I promptly switched it back on and forgot I even had that idea.

[allstaar]

I use carbon copy cloner to back up my system and my Protools and Library drives for that matter.

It does necessarily take quite a while to do this and I've been wondering if there's anything out there that can identify new/changed data and only copy that, but still be reliable and leave system copies in a bootable state.

Really happy with CCC, just wondering is there anything faster ?

[BGMusic]

Super Duper is like CCC, and the first backup takes a while (they always do) but it can then do incremental backups and that will speed up the process.

[Craig F]

If your on a network and want to set up a server Deploy Studio works well
http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html

but I have a lot of rigs