Nothing quite so brick-shitting as the drive with a clone of your main hard drive up and dying just as you need to reimport its contents onto your main hard drive after doing a clean install of a new operating system.
Thank Jeebus I’m paranoid and made a second backup on a different disk before I blew away the main drive. That’s what’s reimporting to my computer at the moment. If I didn’t have that, I’d be completely screwed.
What kills me is that I’d just gotten the computer to boot off the cloned drive half an hour earlier, and there were zero signs the drive was about to die. Second I hooked it up after installing Snow Leopard, it started clicking and refusing to spin up, dead as a doornail.
Now I just have to hope to hell this copy works right when it’s done importing in…1 hour and 15 minutes.
Edit, 2am: Couple nasty bugs in the 10.6.0 version that took me a while and a bunch of Googling to squash, but I think I’ve got the nastiest issues squared away. And even if I don’t…I’m going to bed.