Persistant -35 error & other strangeness on restore full backup

[cczona]

[Retrospect 5.0.238, OS X 10.2.8]

 

I have a full backup of my iBook, which needs to be restored. Whenever I try to do so, however (restore, replacing entire contents), 230MB of 10.2GB never gets back to the drive. Depending on the circumstances of the restore attempt, it either:

 

1) appears to have completed or nearly completed the restore, reaching the point of no files/K left, then after another minute or two it reports an incomplete restore and logs a -35 error ("volume doesn't exist"); or

 

2) after claiming that no files/K are left to restore, it nevertheless continues the restore operation, going on and on until I stop it manually; or

 

3) (this happens only after erasing the entire drive, verifying the drive, verifying permissions[*], running DiskWarrior[*] then mounting it in Firewire Target Disk mode to do the restore) Retrospect claims to have successfully restored the entire 10.2GB.

 

But regardless of which of these happen, the *real* outcome is always the same: approximately 230MB worth of files (scattered throughout the system) never get restored. Doing another restore attempt immediately always results in those files being again selected for restore. But they never actually get written! Agh! The computer refuses to even boot from the disk in its pristine, supposedly just completely restored, state after an outcome #3 even though this same disk was running perfectly at the time of the original backup.

 

I've attempted to follow the advice given in the error codes reference, but it doesn't seem to apply to this situation since there is no option provided to "forget" the destination volume and there are no client volumes listed at all. After 3 days straight days of fruitless attempts to get a successful restore, I'm out of ideas. How do I get this working? Any and all suggestions would be gratefully appreciated.

 

Thank you.

 

 

[1] Of course, the permissions check and DiskWarrior pass are fine at that point since there are no files to be found on a freshly-erased disk. I'm just covering all the bases.