Progress indicator for Rebuild?

You should always keep a fresh install of OS X around. Any external disk, or large Thumbdrive can do this. OS X can suddenly decide not to startup, then your options for fixing your problem, or getting quick access to your data is limited. It is a good practice.

I'm going to partly agree and partly disagree with you. I completely agree that it is good practice to have a bootable backup. That can get you back up and running very quickly after a boot-disk crash. That's why having a once-a-week backup scheduled with a tool like SuperDuper! is a great idea.

However, solving a problem like this one, where I need to be on a 'fresh' (ie. minimal) install to resolve the DiskWarrior seems to get rather onerous. A fresh install is not the same as a bootable backup. What version of the OS should it be? How would I actually go about making this 'fresh' install? What apps should be on it?

It is just something we have noticed over the years that the OS on the Disk Warrior thumbdrive is a basic OS and the boot volume in use may have some problems that cause Disk Warrior not to be able to replace the directory.

So a clean install of a full OS can be useful and sometimes make a difference.