SD hanging in step 1 of Smart Update

[slschramm]

Tried to run a scheduled backup tonight; program is set to do a smart update twice a week. For an hour, the window has shown SuperDuper stuck at step one, "Preparing Macintosh HD". I haven't had this problem before.

In case it's relevant, I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard 10.5.6 last week and ran an "erase, then copy" after I was pleased with the way things were running. This is either my first or second smart update since then (can't remember which).

Should I stop it down and run another "Erase, then copy"?

[dnanian]

In fact, you should stop it and power-cycle your Mac and peripherals.

[slschramm]

Thanks, that's what I wound up doing. After restarting, I went into SD advanced options to look around and the app froze in that window with a spinning beachball until I did a force quit. After that I tried to re-open SuperDuper and got an error message: "An unexpected error occurred (error code -600)." What's going on? Will a reboot of my machine fix this?

[dnanian]

That sounds like your drives are not responding properly. Do you have a lot of external peripherals?

[slschramm]

I have a 500GB LaCie drive attached with Firewire 400. The drive has two partitions, one for TimeMachine and one for SD. I have to say the drive has been behaving oddly for several days. Time Machine has also hung up several times and there are a lot of odd activity sounds from the machine when I think nothing should be happening. Might my external drive be failing?

I also have a couple of things connected through a USB hub. Scanner, printer, that kind of thing.

[dnanian]

OK. So, the first thing I'd do is power off and simplify to just the drive (or, at the very least, connect the drive directly to the Mac and the other stuff through the hub). Let's ee if that helps.