Crotchety login screen preventing me from booting to my external drive

[NBlystra]

This week I discovered that the hard drive on my white Core 2 Duo macbook is failing. It's of course out of warranty. I have superduper! and am in the process of getting things ready to swap out the drive for a new one. Before going ahead with the new install, however, I wanted to test out the bootability of my superduper backup. I held option while restarting and chose to boot from the backup icon. The OSX tiger splash screen appeared and slowly booted up but then a login window appears asking for a name and a password. I assumed it was asking for my administrator name and password. Therefore I entered that information. However, after entering the information and clicking on the login button the window shook back and forth and shook off my password as if to say "No. No!" I tried entering the admin information again and again. I tried the short name. I tried to reset my user information. Nothing worked. So, I tried to redo my backup thinking that there might be some issues on that side of things. But now my backup isn't complete. It's lagging at about 14 gigs shy of the full copy. I want to get this machine back to working order but am running stuck. Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Mal]

"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart."

Cookie if you know the quote.

You may have a failing backup drive, or the internal hard drive that is failing may be preventing a successful backup (may not be able to access the information to do the backup).

It's also possible that the hard drive isn't the issue. Perhaps RAM or something else is causing the issue. What made you suspect the hard drive in the first place? Maybe we can track the issue to something else.

jW

 

[NBlystra]

Mal, I had to google the quote. It's a great one. Thanks for your reply comment. I am concerned that the backup drive might be affected also. However, I ran the disk utility to verify the drive and it came back fine. My internal, on the other hand, came back failing. I'm told that the disk utility doesn't do a full job of assessing the drive, which still could mean that my external also has issues. When I went through the process of backing up the drive last night 2 i/o issues emerged in the superduper log. I found those files; one in a safari library and one was an email message. I deleted both of those files and restarted the superduper program in its smart backup mode. This allowed the backup to proceed further but it ultimately didn't finish the job--which leaves me in a quandary. Do you have any insight into the login issue? I'm hoping that a new, fresh backup will get me past this screen.
Again, Thanks for taking the time to reply.
NB

 

[Mal]

You're likely not going to get a good backup, as in a bootable one. Just make sure (manually) that all of your important data is there, and when you put in the new drive, don't restore the entire drive from the backup, but rather install the system from the DVD's, then move your data back. You'll have to set up a user account, so it's your choice just to use the same username and move everything back to the proper folders, or create a temporary user and delete it after you move your old user folder back and recreate the user account. I'd tend towards the former with those choices.

jW

 

[NBlystra]

This makes sense. There is one caveat that I didn't mention, however. My optical drive doesn't work. I believe one of my kids jammed some paper in the slot. I tried using my wife's Macbook pro's optical drive in the shared setting but couldn't find her drive on my computer to make it happen. I'm not even sure this is even possible with an OS reboot? So I was (am) banking on having a bootable backup to reboot to a new drive. Does this mean that I not only need to purchase a new internal hdd but also an external optical drive? Makes me wonder about biting the bullet and buying a new machine, considering the upgrade benefits. Still, I don't want to put to rest the good qualities of this machine that has served me very well so far.
Hmmm.
NB