General Autosave Error, yikes

Question

I'm getting a "general autosave error" and hope someone out there can help sort this out for me since I have hours and hours to capture this weekend, but don't want to keep going with that message coming up.
I am working in FCP 5.1.4, capturing to an external G-tech firewire hard drive. I had one drive, about half full, onto which I captured a lot of clips. Brought that drive up to my editor, and purchased a second drive so that I can continue logging and capturing while the editor starts cutting.
I initialized drive #2, verified disk permissions,set one partition etc. ~ it is securely attached to a FW 800 card that I purchased for my G4 Powerbook, with a Sony DSR-20 deck capturing footage and attached to the original FW 400 port on the computer.
When I opened FCP I reset the capture scratch disk for this second HD, changing the name from GTECHb to something different after reading it's good to not have a name that contains the name of another drive (the first being, obviously, GTECHa). Set all to the new drive, except autosave vault, which I set to my internal HD, same pathway as before.
Within a folder called FCP files, I have the autosave folder, and for some reason an additional "autosave vault" folder was created within that one ~ into which all my previous project files versions can be found. I have tried setting both the first autosave folder and then it's "sub-folder" as a directory for the autosave vault, but in both cases continue to get this error message.
Wondering if the general autosave error might be due to all the previously captured clips now being offline, or if there is some other problemo. When I open a project after a day or so, FCP gives it a long name with the date and time the project was last modified ~ occasionally I change that name using "save project as..." and am now wondering do I need to make sure that the file name has .fcp on the tail end of it? Searching for possibilities here...
I have saved the projects (one is for 24p footage, one is for 24p advanced footage, different capture settings and all that jazz) and rechecked the system settings, but I'm baffled and frankly a little freaked out.
Is this one of those cases of "trash your preferences" -- if so I'm hoping this does not trash my project files --
anyone?
thanks in advance
15" Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1 GHz, 1 GB SDRAM, 60 GB HD

Answer 1

also when i set my folder:
Users > Me > Final Cut Pro Projects folder >
which has:
Autosave Vault
Custom Settings
Master Projects
FCP manual.pdf
and an XML file
within that Autosave Vault folder, there are two old saved copies of the project (?) then another sub-folder also called AUTOSAVE VAULT
When I click on THAT there are tons of versions of my two projects from different dates (one 24p footage, one 24p advanced footage, same documentary but haven't converted 24p footage yet to 23.98)
...and yet another AUTOSAVE VAULT folder
when i click on that, there is...yup, another AUTOSAVE VAULT folder.
seems it just keeps generating these folders within folders.
...did FCP rescue and so far am not getting the general autosave error - hurrah!
- but all these autosave vault folders (I only directed it toward the FIRST one)...just insane. However, I will know which saves were done on the new FW drive since they are embedded within the embedded (um, within the embedded) folder.
I should go to bed and start again tomorrow.
oy.
will mark your posts as helpful - thank you