After leaving the hard disk recovery process running all night, this morning I decided that a better bet would be just to reformat the hard drive and start fresh.
After installing the OS, and running Software Update to ensure I had the newest versions of everything, I reinstalled PicturePerfect, Adobe Photoshop CS, my Dimage software for my Minolta scanner, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Fugu for secure FTP. This took about an hour, mainly because Photoshop CS has got to be the most stuffed full, compressed software installation there is.
When I installed Panther (Mac OS X 10.3), I checked the option to install X11 so I could use OpenOffice. Downloading this software and installing it took about ten minutes. I also installed the X Code development tools, just for grins and giggles.
I tried to use wget to access WordPress, when I remembered that this isn’t installed on any version of OS X greater than 10.1. I used cURL, instead, though it’s going to be hard to break the wget habit. I also downloaded MySQL and ran its installation program, turned on personal web sharing, and adjusted the httpd.conf file to allow PHP. This took about ten minutes–once I remembered how to use cURL.
My system is much happier now that the hard drive had been reformatted; the performance has improved significantly, and I now have oodles of free space. This whole thing ended up being a piece of cake, and my PowerBook is now a buff little beastie–leaner and meaner.
If only we could reformat our lives so easily.