Mac Pro :: Reformat HDD And Use Time Machine To Reinstall Applications?
Nov 18, 2009
I need to reformat my Boot drive because Ubuntu messed up my Master Boot Record and I can not run Boot Camp. I have a time machine back up of all my applications. Can I use this once I reinstall OSX?
I recently reinstalled OSX 10.5.8 on my penryn MBP so I could make a larger XP bootcamp partition. After reinstalling leopard and restoring my whole system through time machine my computer is acting weird. First, "the file "itunes library" cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of itunes". It didn't upgrade itunes to 9 till after I had done all the TM restoring. should be older, no? Second, adobe applications crashed. I was in AI working on a 500 mb file and BOOM, beach ball>crash. All other CS3 unable to open. I have 4 gigs of ram and some of the applications that would not open were not even in use at the time of the AI crash, could this be something with the TM backup? CS3 was all installed together.
Third. While this epic crash is happening on my desktop disappears. Just a blank desktop image. but wait, If I click were things used to be, Bam they appear out of no where, but only if I click where it is supposed to be. It's there in the desktop folder but not showing up as icons on my desktop. I think this has happened to me before the reinstall too, though never all at once, usually when I use the "pinchy" to resize icons one or two will disappear. Fourth. Cisco clean access agent beach balls and requires hard reset. the login window was floating on screen all the way till the screen turned off. These all happened in the same day, now It is working some what like normal, though my itunes is broke. Any ideas on how to fix this itunes? If I only need one application and it's plug-ins (SU and Podium beta) restored through TM ( i have a disk for all the others) is there a way to just restore the one. Would this give me a more stable system over all? should I go ahead and reinstall and restore the one app and do the rest manually?
made a big mistake by trying to delete Time Machine backups with the Trash Can. It was such a big mistake that I have to reformat the Hard Drive for Time Machine. But I'm not much of a computer formatting specialist
I have a Western Digital 500gig external hard drive (model wd5000c032) which I'd like to completely reformat to use with my macbook pro and Time Machine (running os 10).As it is now, my mac can only use 147 gigs, and often gives an error message saying it needs additional space to backup. It was previously used on a pc to hold pictures, but I doubt it used anything near 357 gigs for that.
I have an external hard drive upon which I put movie files that I view through a Sony box (like the Roku box). I brought my MacBook in for a repair and connected the same external HD and used Time Machine to make a back up. It did reformat it in order to do so, but since the Sony box isn't a pc or mac I didn't think it would make a difference, but now the Sony box won't recognize HD. Is there a way to reformat it on my MacBook so that I can use it on the Sony box again, or do I need to reformat it with a Windows computer? I had no issues when transferring files only and using the Sony box.
I have a question which I am quite unsure. I am shopping for a HDD drive (Western Digital My Book 3 TB) and was told that it cannot be reformatted to be compatible with TIme Machine.
Say my macbook pro crashes and I lose everything. However, I have been saving everything to an external drive using the Time Machine app. Can I use my external drive to get my computer to exactly the same state it was in before it crashed? By this I mean.
1) Desktop icons in the same places 2) System preferences all the same 3) Sticky notes all still exist and are laid out on the desktop just like previously before my hard drive crashed and I lost everything 4) My dock layout is exactly the same, same apps, same locations in the dock
I have been wondering this for quite some time. Because I know you can restore the essentials (i.e. Word documents, many different saved files) but what about little things like the above mentioned items?
I just reinstalled my system on a new system drive and then used the migration assistant to transfer *only* the user accounts and not the settings or applications etc. I wanted (needed) to start relatively clean. The system after all of this is very similar to the original system (same apps, same users, mostly the same settings etc.) and I would like to continue using my old Time Machine back-up if I can, but when I start Time Machine it just wants to create a new back-up and won't recognize the older back-up. I've read up about what to do if you get a new TM disk or if your have your logic board replaced, but this situation seems different. I can't figure out what would appear different to TM about my "new" system.
So I've got a unibody MBP and connected to this I have a 320gb external drive I use to back up, but I only back up music, movies and documents so it's got 50 free gigabytes. I was hoping to partition off say 30gigs, install tinyxp and play games off this partition. But when I try and partition off 30, 25 or even 20 gigs Disk Utility tells me there's no free space on the hard drive.
So my questions are, how can I solve this issues, and would this idea work for playing games through windows anyway? I initially tried to get a bootcamp partition on my main Macintosh HD, but apparently there are files that cannot be moved in the way, and the only way to solve said issue is a complete reinstall of leopard, which I can't be bothered with seeing as snow leopards only a couple of months away.
I am going to replace my hard drive (and add RAM) on my Macbook Pro (mid-2009) myself. I have Lion (10.7.4) currently, and have backed up via time machine on an external drive. I don't have Lion on a usb, and from what I read, Lion Recovery via internet isn't applicable for my macbook (pre 2010). Is the time machine backup a bootable drive? If so, then am I all good so long as my backup is completed prior to replacing the hard drive? If not, how do I create a bootable drive so I can get back to "normal"?Â
I got the fatal folder with with question mark and grinding sound of the hard drive when starting my 2008 Mac Pro this weekend. After some diagnostics it was obvious the Hard Drive is dead, of course its the main drive that runs the OS and all my apps. I am picking up a new drive today and was wondering the best approach to get it up and running again. Everying it is backed-up on my external drive through Time Machine. Since the drive is dead I can't use a copy cloner to the new drive. Would I install the the hardrive and start the Mac Pro to boot off the Leopard CD, intall that and then try to run the backup from Time Machine?
I just got a new 1tb sata 2.5in and I want to install it, but I do not have my snow leopard disk. If I use a leapord disk will it reinstall snow leapord from my time machine backup or do I need to find my snowleapord disk?
I just received my refurb 1.8/SSD Air and I'm excited about getting it up and running. I'm confused about one thing. If I do a reinstall to delete printer drivers and languages, and then do a time machine migration from my MBP, would all of the drivers and languages reappear from the migration?
I want to wipe my system and only restore certain files to keep my system uncluttered and fresh. I use Time Machine so I thought I don't have anything to do now that everything is backed up. Someone told me once that Time Machine files can only be accessed by the user that created them (me). If I wipe my hard drive, that user will no longer exist. When I reinstall OS X, it will be a new user, so would that new user still be able to easily access and copy back the files from the Time Machine drive onto the internal drive?
I know there's a feature called "Browse other Time Machine Disks" but I don't know if that allows me to do anything I want and whether it will conflict with the new system. I also know about Migration Assistant but I don't want to use such automatic methods since I'm afraid it will restore problems from my old system. So in short, will I be able to easily get my files back one by one (not "all or nothing" like with Migration Assistant) from Time Machine when I will have my clean, freshly reinstalled OS X, with possibly a different username? Or does this only work if I type in the exact same user name as I am using now?
With Firevault enabled, I attempted to reinstall OS X Lion from Recovery Mode. After being asked to enter the password to unlock the encrypted 'Mactinosh HD' disk, the reinstallation began. Everything seemed fine until the install process was supposedly finished, then a window popped up explaining that there was an error and to try again. I tried again and the same thing happened. I also tried to restore from Time Machine with no success (the same thing happened). I opened Disk Utility via Recovery mode and verified/repaired the 'Macintosh HD' disk and its permissions, but the reinstall/Time Machine restore still fails.
Then I erased the disk with Disc Utility, and attempted this again with no success. My computer no longer boots into OS X at all (it didn't even before I erased the disk via Disk Utility). It can only boot into Recovery Mode or Windows--I'm basically running a pretty overpriced Windows PC. I am using a 21" iMac with an Intel Core i5 processor, CPU @ 250GHz, have 4 GB of RAM and am (supposed to be) running OS X 10.7 Lion. Right now I'm using Windows 8 Consumer Preview x64 bit on a Bootcamp partition on the same computer if that matters to anyone.
I had to recover my primary Macinstoh HD to a new disk from Time Machine, but somehow I now lost my Recover HD on the Macintosh HD. To do the initial recover I had to install Mac OS X Lion on a 2nd internal Hard Drive, but now I want to use Time Machine and go back to before I installed Lion, because the permissions are messed up and I can no longer use that disk 2nd disk, unless I continually enter the admin password. Now when I hold down Apple - R key during boot I no longer get to Recovery HD. I was able to see Recovery HD using the System Information app, then within the Serial-ATA section, but that Apple_Boot volume is gone.Â
Info: Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), How to reinstall Recovery HD...
Someone has suggested that I reformat my system to help eliminate problems with my version update. I have an ibook G3 128+512 mg ram 900 mhz white case 12' It had a Mac osX 2.8 verion. I updated to Mac OS X 3.9. I have had problems ever since with firefox versions not working and crashing. I have not been able to use flash or adobe flash because they won;t load. Flash or adobe flash won't load on Safari, either. How do I a reformat. Will this erase my hard drive. Is this the same as a clean install.
I need to reformat a drive and reinstall the OS. I and using Avid Media Composer and it is not qualified on 10.7.3. How can I install 10.7.2 of a new drive?Â
How do I reformat my HD and reinstall Mac OSX Lion? I somehow corrupted username.sparsebundle in FileVault and therefore can't log in. I need to reformat the HD and reinstall the latest OS. (I do not want to use FileVault going forward.)
Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
My MBPro is getting cranky in a number of ways that indicate a reinstall of Snow Leopard is in order. After the requisite disk first aid check I attempted to run the installer only to get a dialog box telling me that the system cannot be installed because this disk is used by time machine. The MacBook disk is of course a source for back ups but not a back up drive. Even after restarting and explicitly turning off Time machine I get the same results.What do I need to set to allow the installer to run. The installer cd is a stand alone snow leopard install cd, not a machine specific cd.
I recently did a complete erase of my hard drive and re-installed Mavericks. I chose to start clean rather than use any Time Machine back-ups. I used the same external hard drive for my new Time Machine back-ups. Now I cannot open any back-ups/items prior to the re-install via Time Machine. They are listed along the right hand sidebar in Time Machine (star wars view) but will not open when clicked on.Â
Some files I can access if I go to the actual backup folder - ex a Pages doc BUT ff I try to open the iPhoto library from the back-up folders stored on the external drive, I get the following error message -
I cannot open the iPhoto "package" to access individual photos from these back-ups.Â
So - how can I get Time Machine to allow access to the pre-install back-ups??Â
I installed windows through bootcamp and partitioned my hard drive to about a 300Gb/600Gb windows and mac respectively. After a while i decided to remove the windows partition. As I was repartitioning the Hard Drive through disk utility my mac froze and went to a gray screen so I restarted it. Disk utility says that the process finished however it does not recognise the 300Gb I used for windows. i.e. Disk utility says there is one partition, and that the total capacity is about 1Tb.
However the spaced used and space available adds up to 600Gb, its like the mac thinks that it is repartitoned to just 1, but not allowing me to acces that 300Gb. so my question is how do i completely strip back the hard drive to basic factory settings (iv backed up all my data to an external drive) so I can reinstall the mac operating system and repair the drive to make use of its full capacity, then re install from my backed up external drive.
can't open the program time machine located in the folder /applications/time machine anymore, message says program ain't working for unknown reaason, but I still can open time machine in the menu bar. any clues what the trouble might be? and/or is there any way to reinstall time machine only on os x 10.7.3?Â
btw., on the system backup hd which is a mirror of the imac system, the programm still works
I have an iMac 2.4ghz with a 320g hd, that I partitioned 50/270 when I installed Leopard. I read somewhere to have the opp system partitioned and I have been kicking myself in the rear ever since. Too many apps and files want to run next to the opp system, so I'm starting over.I used time machine for a backup of the system (both partitions are showing) on my 1 TB iomega external hard drive (minimax). I partitioned the external 500/500, time machine/additional storage.So that is what I'm working with, now for the question:With my backup complete, if I do a clean install to the internal hard drive (320g) in order to remove the 50g opp/sys partition and just have one 320g internal hd; will my time machine be able to restore to a clean 320 without having the 50/270gig partition setup? If so will this be a somewhat simple process?