Preparing - tried all

Question

My installation worked well for a few months then hit this "preparing" wall - preparing would run for 2 hours
Tried all the tricks including repaired permissions of the boot disc- ran disk repair on both disks. Unmounted and remounted disk (USB connection). Excluded the backup disc from spot light, ran sudo mdutil -E / to rebuild spotlight. Removed the most recent backup.
The disc was originally formatted by Time machine. The backup disc contains no spaces or illegal characters. Anything else I could look out for?
I have since given up and reformatted. One thing I did change is formatted HSF+ without journaling. Hope that works.
On another front this machine is a test one and even if I dont touch my computer (except for checking Mail) I still have over a Gig of uploads per backup. (whole installation is only 20 Gb) This seems large considering I dont have photos, dont use entourage and VM ware is listed not to backup.
Does this seem alot?

Answer 1

Hello,
Thanks for your message, I have attempted to repait the permissions as tou suggested.  The first time this produced a long list of exceptions and took quite a while, however although it said "Permissions repair Complete" when I ran it again there were still about 20 exceptions, I have repeated the procedure and this is unchanged.  The Time Capsule now does not spend hours "Preparing", but the backup attempt fails after a few minutes with the error message "The backup volume could not be mounted."  Any further ideas would be appreciated.   When I use Disk Utility I can't see the Time Capsule volume, if I could I'd be tempted to re-format it and start from scratch.