About a month and a half ago, the hard drive on my Macbook Pro started acting up. I'd been taking frequently backups, so I wasn't going to be losing anything, but it's still a pain to pick up and put down elsewhere whenever you have to do it. I transferred a subset of my files over to my netbook, and have been using it as my daily driver since. The user experience is... well, shit, given the cramped keyboard, the bad touchpad, and the screen with about 2 degrees of viewing angle, but it would do.

Getting back from the trip, I ordered 250GB SSD as replacement (the original drive having the same capacity). It got in yesterday, and I spent the evening trying to put things back together. Here's what happened.

1. Spent two hours doing a bit-for-bit copy of the original drive onto the new drive using the Mac OS X installer tools. This failed miserably, despite being as close to the original disk configuration as possible. The machine would only bootup and give the vague "folder with a questionmark" response.
2. Re-installed Mac OS X Snow Leopard on top of the original (leaving my original user and application files in place). This yielded a successfully booting machine, but logging in to my user account, all functions that required encryption of any kind were broken (including: HTTPS traffic, verification of system updates, etc.). No amount of keychain repair seemed to address the issue, and I was forced to create a new user account alongside the second one.
3. Cruising around for a while, putting configurations back into place, I was finding that a number of files were corrupted (more specifically, filled with "zeroes"). These are files that were transferred directly from the original (though, somewhat questionable) drive, and should have been identical to their original contents. This made for some interesting behavior, as very basic files within the machine were completely broken, yet didn't really indicate much when it came to the user interface. For instance, ITunes reported that its library was "damaged," but didn't indicate that the library database had been replaced with zeroes. (shrugs)

I still have to figure out how pervasive the corruption is. If it's just a few files (and unimportant ones), I can reload them from backups. If it's more, I may as well start from the ground up with a fresh partition and installation. I'll lose a good portion of my original configurations, but I won't be at risk of random corruption of more critical files.

I am, however, glad to have had a backup prior to this process (and subsequent corruption). Recounting here so maybe my mistakes can serve as a lesson to others.