Replaced Logic Board

A week or so ago I began having kernel panics. I have a MBP that was purchased in 7/2007. I researched this forum and found suggestions ( http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/151975-how-do-you-fix-kernel-panic.html ) to repair. I conducted all the tests and found the video controller was a problem. I went in to our local Apple store and met with a Genius. He found the problem was with the video controller and the repair was to replace the entire logic board. The controller is part of this and couldn't be fixed by itself.

The computer was over-nighted to the repair facility in Texas. It was repaired and again over-nighted to me in So. California. Four days to get a practically new computer. Thank goodness for Apple Care.

Here is what I learned during this ordeal. Before I determined the panics were caused by hardware problems, I reinstalled Leopard a total of 5 times. Doing this by archiving and installing produces another complete version of the Leopard disk. Pretty soon, the hard disk was filled. Time Machine can not be used to bring your entire hard drive back to a previous version. It can only be used to restore individual files. There is a way to delete these previous system files, thereby freeing a lot of disk space. In my case, I got back 60 GB!

Glad you got it all sorted out and it's back in working order. Apple service and repair is definitely the best. And congratulations on doing the testing and trouble shooting yourself coming up with the correct diagnosis.

As for Time Machine... it's free and when used correctly can save your backside. ;D However, a better method of backing up in my opinion, would be to use something like "SuperDuper" or "Carbon Copy Cloner" to produce a bootable backup.

Regards.

I have SuperDuper, however, am puzzled how to create the "sandbox." Can somebody who has done this provide some instruction. I'm hesitant to partition my 120 HD, since I now only have about 55%+ remaining on it.

SuperDuper is primarily intended to be used with an external drive. You would not want to partition your internal drive and use it in any way as a backup medium. If the internal drive should fail (and all drives eventually fail) any backup made with SuperDuper or Time Machine would be useless.

Buy an external drive instead or buy a new larger hard drive and replace the current drive in your machine. Then you can use the original 120 GB drive in an external carrier to make backups.

Regards.