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After roughly twenty four hours of working and waiting on Danielle’s computer I have the hard drive uncorrupted and Time Machine working! It turns out that despite my previous thought that the corrupt drive was preventing backups from happening it was actually something else: the entries for the shared drive on the AirPort in the System Keychain somehow weren’t working right. Deleting them and allowing them to be recreated fixed things.
Since I have syslog on the AirPorts logging to pfSense (on the alix2d1). By using that along with logs on the Mac I could see that everything was pointing to an authentication issue. The user account could access the drive just fine, but Time Machine sets the shared drive’s password in the System Keychain during setup, so I then looked there. Seeing a number of entries for Core, the name of the AP, I removed them all and set things up again. Suddenly Time Machine created its .sparsebundle, mounted it, and set off backing things up. While I don’t know exactly what was wrong (conflicting Keychain entries? wrong one getting read? defective Keychain?) at least I know what got things working again.
I’ve plugged the machine into a wired connection to hurry things along, but hopefully the remaining ~107GB of data will be backed up before Danielle gets here. Then hopefully it’ll keep working…