Errors during process of cloning hard drive

Question

I recently purchased an external HD to make a backup of my internal HD , having had an OS crash which, thankfully, I was able to recover from.
I am using the application, Carbon Copy Cloner, which is working very well.
I cloned my internal HD to the new external HD and was able to boot up from the external HD perfectly.
The only problem I'm having is there are a couple errors occurring in the clone process. They are showing up in the console log.
Here are excerpts from the log:
"23:12:31 528: An error occurred while copying /.hotfiles.btree: Resource busy"
and
"CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): plist parse failed; the data is not proper UTF-8. The file name for this data could be:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/EngineDefaults.plist
The parser will retry as in 10.2, but the problem should be corrected in the plist."
As I said, the drive cloning process still runs to completion and the clone operates as it should.
But these errors, perhaps insignificant perhaps not, still bother me.
Can anyone give me a hand on correcting them?
Thanks,
Dan Tee

Answer 1

2. On using Pacifist is the procedure to extract the damaged file from the Hard Drive -- then install just that file from the Install DVD using Pacifist for both actions?
I'm not (obviously) BDAqua so s/he will correct me if I'm wrong, but the file which BDAqua is guessing stores directory information for the most frequently used files would be /.hotfiles.btree. I've not had a problem cloning a "live" system but one way to make absolutely certain this file is not in use during a clone would be to boot from a different volume. If you are booted from the source volume, there is always a chance that this file will be in use when CCC goes to copy it. Obviously, the greater the number of files you (or the system) is opening and closing, the greater the chances are that it will be in use. If you always see this, that might indicate something awry - not necessarily with CCC but it would raise questions about why the process which uses this file is doing so much. My system tends to be relatively quiet when I clone in the sense that I don't usually make active use of the computer during that time. This is just because CCC slows things down enormously so I prefer setting it to run overnight when CCC and I don't have to compete for CPU/memory resources etc. Having said that, the system is still running all kinds of things and accessing all kinds of files. I don't know whether the adjustment process BDAqua mentions applies to those files, too, or just user-level files. Maybe see what the experience of others, who make similar use of their computers during cloning to the use you make of yours, is - that might give you a sense of whether you are seeing this error too frequently or not.
I guess I'm a bit unsure about how to identify which file(s) to work on.
The error concerning /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/EngineDefaults.plist suggests that this file is damaged so this is the one you'd want to extract and reinstall using Pacifist. Since the version of the OS on your install disk will be older, you may also wish to check whether this file has been updated since and, if so, you could extract and reinstall it from the relevant update package instead (using Pacifist).
To check the file before proceeding, type the following in terminal:
/usr/bin/plutil -lint /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/EngineDefaults.plist
You should get a message saying the file is "OK". If you don't, it is damaged and needs attention.
- cfr
Thanks for the help,
Dan Tee