When it comes to daily life stuff, I am not really a fan of chasing the trend to do updates actively. Such attitudes certainly apply to the macbook pro that I’ve been using over the years on an extremely intense basis, I’d say. So when my boss finally requested to upgrade this baby to leopard OS for multiple times, I was as reluctant as I was to clean up my garage with millions of dust covered antiques. yes, my garage has everything, except cars. 
It all happened within my expectation, problematic and exhausting. I’ve spent 2 full days, to do the very first step of this project - restore the hard drive to an external drive. Having tried USB, firewire and different external drives, different ways, restore from the install disk, restore from the desktop, went to mac forum and even called Apple customer service and being told my warranty is expired, I gave up. Had too much stuff in this baby - not just data, but also the applications which I have no clue how to reinstall since either the CDs are not handy any more or the keys are nowhere to dig out, to take the risk of upgrading without the full disk imaging backup is the last thing I would do.
Days later, I found this software - SuperDuper!, a renowned application for mac restoration. After 2 hours running, it gave me the exact same error message as the Disk Utility in mac says - “Restore failure, input/output error”! Right at the moment I was about to pass out, I found this log file with all my ecstasy. All right, so it turned out to be one of the millions of files in this machine is corrupted - it is the Flash CS3 video encoder. The restore worked perfectly right after I removed this brat.
Now I am with Leopard, will try Time Machine shortly.
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