defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This turned out to be a life saver. Last Monday at work things started slowing down, big time. Eventually everything locked up. I could move my mouse but the OS would not accept keyboard input and none of the open apps would respond.

I powered it down and it booted up to the ? folder. I booted into my Leopard DVD and opened disk utilities. No hard drive was detected. How bad is that?

On the new MacBooks the hard drive is a user serviceable part. They had a replacement hard drive to me the next day.

Restoring from my time machine backup got me up and running in no time at all. I found that there are two ways to restore during the leopard install process.

1. Stop the install and go to the utilities menu. Select the time machine restore option and it will restore the entire hard drive as it was before.

2. Go through the install process as you would for a fresh install with your time machine drive plugged in. After the install reboots it will ask you what you want to restore. If memory serves it had check boxes for…

• Home directory
• Applications
• Settings
• Everything else

The “everything else” is useful if you have fink installed as its outside the normal directory structure.

EDIT: Now I know why the drive failed.    It was the same model as the article reports and I did hear loud clicking.  Mystery solved.