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[yelloguy]

Not a question but more of a gripe and a warning.  I thought I was doing everything super cautious but this bit me big-time yesterday.  I installed SL on an externa HDD and made sure it was usable before I installed it on my internal HDD replacing a working hacked Leopard 10.5.7 install (non vanilla).

When I tried installing from within the External SL install, it kept erroring on me.  Either install failed message or the Restart Mac screen.  So I decided to use Disk Utility to do a HDD to HDD copy.  That was the end of my Leopard install.  I had a up-to-date Time Machine backup and in the past, migrating settings and apps from the TM backup worked a treat.  So I was hoping to do that and be up and running in an hour or two.

But as soon as I finished importing everything from TM, the internal hard drive wouldn't boot.  I kept getting a ACPI something or the other timeout.  I tried a few searches, deleted a few kexts, but in the end, decided to redo everything.

Second attempt, I imported only my user folder, and applications and left the settings alone.  But even that gave me the same problem.

So a third attempt, and this time I did not  migrate anything.  Rather I went into the Time Machine folders and copied the files from the latest folder.  I have only done the user files (documents, music, movies, downloads) so far and it seems to be rebooting fine.

I will probably install the applications again.  But if I don't find the installer or the serial for something I may have to import it from the TM backup.  I am not sure if the settings are stored separately or not, but I will have to figure that out.

Just a heads up for someone to save them a lot of heartache and help them plan better.