Time out of Time Capsule - even with Ethernet

Question

My 500G Time Capsule since yesterday evening refuses to work for longer than a few minutes, which is far too little for any backup.
The problem first was seen when I used it with WiFi. I then connected the TC directly with ethernet to my MacBook. Initiated a backup. After some time, it refuses to respond any more.
Click on the TC icon in the Finder column view, and nothing comes up.
Try cd /Volumes/tcapsule in the Terminal, and the terminal window freezes.
Open the TC preferences and System Preferences freeze.
I tried resetting the TC with a paper clip.
I tried restarting the TC. After that, it works for a few more minutes, before it freezes again.
I tried removing the file com.apple.TimeMachine.plist.
I tried restarting the Mac umpteen times. It usually freezes as well when the TC is frozen.
I used Disk Utility to repair the Mac's harddisk.
I used Disk Utility to try to repair the image on the TC, dragging its icon to Disk Utility. However, it gives up - probably when the TC times out.
Does anyone have any idea what I could do in addition to those things, while keeping the old backups on the TC? I would prefer not to reformat the TC.
A new backup to third party Lacie HD worked fine, so I guess the Mac is ok, and the problem really is with the TC.

Answer 1

Jolly Giant wrote:
some users solved their problems by going this route:
"Their problems"... Do you know of people, or did you find people who describe the same symptom as me, with a time out?
go system preferences > time machine and turn TM off. click on +change disk+ and select none.
next, delete this file HD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist.
restart your machine, go system preferences > time machine and turn TM back on. click on +change disk+, re-select your backup volume und click +use for backups+.
Yep, that's pretty much what I did, as described in my initial post. I actually followed your exact steps again, but not luck.
download and install Time Machine Buddy if you don't have it already. start a backup and see what TM buddy reports.
Done that too, but the errors do not help me very much. A typical session may look like this:
Starting standard backup
Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/tcapsule
Disk image /Volumes/tcapsule/Magnus Lewan’s MacBook_002332b4fbc4.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of Magnus Lewan’s MacBook
Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of Magnus Lewan’s MacBook/Backups.backupdb
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: blanco
Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
No pre-backup thinning needed: 23.55 GB requested (including padding), 24.83 GB available
Waiting for index to be ready (100)
And then nothing more.
The last one was somewhat more descriptive, but still no reason why things fail, and of course no suggested remedy:
Starting standard backup
Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/tcapsule
Error while checking destination cookies: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 UserInfo=0x100120690 "The file “.002332b4fbc4” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file." Underlying Error=(Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2 "The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory")
Creating disk image /Volumes/tcapsule/blanko.sparsebundle
Error 22 creating backup disk image
Failed to create disk image
Backup failed with error: 20
It seems to first fail to read the previous sparsebundle and then it tries to create a new one. This may fail because the disk is full, but it should be able to open the previous one.