Dan Shoop is helpfully taking the time to provide pointers. I post this here (as well as in the other threads I have going on these difficulties) to get some Googlejuice and to create a wider footprint for other frustrated Wallstreeters that will be facing this after they dutifully apply resets, creating this problem.

He recently presented on bare-metal recovery for OS X. His opinion (I think) is that when the Wallstreets were reset (shift-fn-crtl-power) it zapped a Wallstreet-specific boot component which he refers to as XCOFF. Below are the steps that I’ve abstracted from his recovery recommendation, as yet untested.

1. swap the 10gb / 2 partition drive into the local bay to rule out wonkiness in the exp bus connection as regards the XCOFF/nvramc

2. reboot into OS X 10.2 installer CD

3. reformat HD to 7gb/2+gb in DU

4. Set startup disk to OSX 10.2 installer CD. shut down

5. reboot into OSX 10.2 installer CD in single-user mode (must be a cold boot!)

6. Create a synthfs filesystem and mount the internal drive and backup drive using autodiskmounter.

7. bless the intended boot drive locally. Using ‘bless -device’? Unsure.

8. restore from backup. CCC won’t work, Shoop states (possibly because we’re booted into a flavor of the OS that can’t run it).

9. backup in place, use nvramrc -f to copy the Wallstreet’s nvramrc file from the CD to the internal HD.

10. bless -folder

11. Reboot.

—

I have research to do:

step 6: filesystem creation and mounting (the backup drive may not be mountable at this juncture)

step 7: clarifying the command

8: no backup tool has been specified. You note a commandline binary is needed but psync and ditto are unavailable from the install cd. Dan mentioned rsyncx.