I've taken the plunge and upgraded (via a clean install) to Mountain Lion. I'd been holding up after the rocky Aperture upgrade to v3.3 put the fear of God into me …

Following the clean install of the OS, I've installed A3 from my DVD, and upgraded it to A3.3.2. Once upgraded, I opened my A3.3.0 library. All my folders, projects, previews, books etc are there. I then saw the same problem I saw after my upgrade to A3.3.0 - my ~70k referenced images are showing as disconnected!!!!! Every preview shows the “the referenced image’s original is offline” badge.

All of my images are on my 'Macintosh HD'; there are no external drives involved.

If I right click on an image and “Locate Referenced Files”, the dialog has the correct path to the image … the file is where I expect it to be … but in the top left of the dialogue Aperture tells me that my 'Macintosh HD' is offline. If I click on that drive, the Verify and Mount buttons underneath it changes to greyed out.

If I import a new image, this works fine. If I select both the new image and any old one and “Locate Referenced Files”, the dialog reports the paths for both correctly, but shows two 'Macintosh HD' - one offline and one online.

Any ideas on why Aperture thinks the HHD I've booted with is offline? And more importantly, how to fix? I've tried:

> Joseph's trick of creating a new library and then importing the old library into it (took ~2 days).
> repairing permissions and rebuilding the library via Apertures CMD-OPT launch (~1d)
> verifying permissions on the HHD with Disk Utility
> Opening the library with iPhoto (images all shown and accessible … not sure if iPhoto thought them online or not, given that it does not do referenced images in the same way).

Yearning for the days of pre A3.3 stability

Steve