My Macbook Pro hard drive failed. It is completely unrecoverable. I've purchased a replacement. How do I format the drive, install Lion and restore my system from my Time Machine backup? My Time Machine backup was created from a USB connection directly to my Macbook Pro. I have a Apple Lion USB Install Thumbdrive.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
Since upgrading to Lion I've experienced periodic crashes- my 24" iMac (2.93 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB memory) suddenly shut down using iPhoto, Safari, and/or Pages. After running numerous hardware diagnostic tests I was told it was not a hardware problem, and a complete reinstall of Lion and all Apple software was recommended. I had back-ups on a My Book which I thought I could easily use to restore my personal data. I was directed to drag files between Finder windows rather than try to restore from backup via Time Machine. All was well & good until I tried to restore my numerous mail folders and locally-saved emails.
Evidently Mail is a hidden folder... I've been told by user group buddies how to see the hidden Mail folder on my iMac, but not on the My Book. Trying to restore from back-up via Time Machine is not an option, as I guess it doesn't recognize the newly installed system. Also tried going into Mail and importing, but when I navigate to the backup there is no visible Mail folder. Another suggestion was to try 3rd party software i.e. Back in Time or BackUp Loupe. I keep thinking there's some secret key combination, some easy way I just don't know of to retrieve my Mail data from the backup... is there???
Info:
iPhoto '11, Time Machine backing up to My Book
I've got a Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard installed, but it has been going sort of sluggish lately so I've decided to do a clean reinstall of Snow Leopard to try and improve things. I've got an up-to-date backup with Time Machine to my Time Capsule. When I do a clean install of Snow Leopard, will I be able to easily restore the files that I want to keep and the applications that I want to put back on my system (with their settings)?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI 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.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI'm running an iMac (one of the all-white, 1.83 GHz C2D machines, with 512MB RAM) and i've noticed in recent months it's become outrageously slow, i have no idea why but it's just horrendous.
I'd really like to start afresh with a clean install of Leopard, but only if it will make a difference.
Currently i'm finding that even with 2 apps open (eg Mail and Safari) there is serious lag now and again, and sometimes things lock up completely. Is this just a bloated OSX install or signs the computer is dying?
Anyway, i have a 180GB backup drive currently used for Time Machine, but if i reinstall then restore from that drive, won't it just restore all the bloat?
I recently (2 months ago) got a 17" MBP, and I used Target Disk/Firewire to "clone" the contents of my 2 year old iMac onto it. It all worked great, and went fine, however last night I attempted to use Boot Camp to create a 64GB partition to install Windows 7, and got the dreaded "The disk cannot be partitioned" error, "please format your HD and reinstall OS X" message.
I ran various tools (Disk Utility from OS X Install DVD, Disk Warrior, MainMenu, Onyx, etc) to try repair and perform maintenance, then I bought iDefrag and ran a full defrag overnight, but this morning I noticed it had failed half way through, and it too suggested reformatting the HD.
I have a full Time Machine backup on my 1TB USB drive (connected to my Mac Mini, it backs up to the MBP over the network) so my question is how easy is to it completely format my MBP hard disk and restore a complete Time Machine backup? I'm completely panicking even about the though of it, I've never done a reinstall/format since I switched to Macs in July 2008!!
Can I use iCloud to back up and then return my files for system restroe? I just wanna back up my music and photos so I can do a system restore if I have iCloud will it allow me to download them back on once I finish the system restore?
Info:
MacBook
I have a hard drive with bad blocks. I backup the data and various other part of the drive to the cloud. However, I want to make a backup of the entire disk but want to be able to access all the data individually as I want to transfer the data onto a new HD and the applications/fonts etc onto an SSD. Also, is it advisable to literally copy the contents of the Applications folder across to the new SSD drive or should they really be re-installed one by one (yikes!)?
View 7 Replies View Related I decided to restore to a Time Machine backup I had done a few days earlier, hoping that I would just "start" fresh. Without realizing it, I had inserted the Leopard install dvd that came with my computer, and restored to my 10.6.6 backup. I got the "You must restart your computer" error, which I found out was a result of using the Leopard disk. So, I redid the restore using a Snow Leopard installer on USB.
After this, everything appeared to be working fairly well. However, today, I've started to get system crashes quite frequently, and at times I haven't been able to properly shut down or restart. I noticed that Spotlight was indexing, and would hang at "3 hours remaining" or "estimating time left." Right now, I have created a second admin account, and I have disabled indexing. It seems to be working, at least temporarily, because I'm using it right 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.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI run a small home network with mostly Windows computers but now with my new Mac Mini included. Right now I am backing up two of the computers separately and a few not at all. I am looking into a networking backup hard drive such as a Seagate Black Armor or WD World Edition.
My question is whether I can backup all the computers on the network or if the Mac will not be backed up because of the different hard drive formats on the computers.
If the network backup drive is foratted using NTFS, will it be able to backup and restore to the Mac as necessary. Will the Mac be able to read/write to the network backup drive as necessary?
I just bought a new iomega external drive that I would like to format to be a bootable backup drive. (I'm not sure if I'll use rsync or TimeMachine yet for doing the actual backups).
Should I format it using DiskUtility or TimeMachine? Will TimeMachine create a bootable backup?
I just replaced my hard drive today. I booted it up and went to disk utilities to format it and all of that. When I finished I went to restore system from back up and plugged in my external hard drive and the computer said there was no history of back up from Time Machine. This was strange because before I formated the hard drive and tried to restore the information, it recognized that there was back up information. I decided I would re-install the os and try again.
View 6 Replies View RelatedI bought a new Hitachi 1tb bare drive and have been trying to format it through Disk Utility. I have it connected to my iMac system using a Newertech USB 2.0 drive connector.The new drive appears in Disk Utility, and when I go through the "Erase" tab and set if up as Journaled - the system seems to go into formatting mode for about ten minutes and then I get an error and I have to Force Quit the Disk Utility.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI am a pc guru but not so technical with the Macs. I have a Mini with really only iPhoto and iDVD data on it. I want to replace the 160g drive with a 320g drive and of course keep the data. There are 2 options I'd entertain for this backup/restore situation: 1)Figuring out how to export/save the iPhoto and iDVD stuff onto an external hard drive, install the the new drive, re-install all the software, and import the iPhoto and iDVD stuff. I would imagine this option, if possible, would be the easiest and likely fastest solution. Clone the 160g drive somewhere, install the 320g, and restore the clone to the new 320g. This option I am quite familiar with in the pc world by using Norton Ghost. The Mini was purchased in Aug 2007 (right after the refresh) so it's not the latest Mac OS. any tips or weblinks?
View 8 Replies View RelatedI recently bought a new hard drive for my 2006 MacBook but have run into nothing but problems while trying to restore my time machine backup onto it. Using my Leopard Family Pack disc, I was unable to format my drive successfully so I scheduled an appointment with the Genius Bar. When I went, the Genius used his USB hard drive to format the drive and install Leopard. While using that, he ran into no problems that I had run into while using my Leopard disc. So Leopard is installed and I go home to restore my backup and the backup fails (Migration Assistant and booting from Leopard Disc). So I schedule a second appointment and the Genius tells me there's no way he can attempt to restore my backup due to time restraints (which is understandable) and runs diagnostics on my hard drive and the time capsule's hard drive, finding no issues. He installs Leopard again on my new drive and I go home to run into the exact same problems I did last time. I don't know what to do, the Geniuses won't help me, and I can't find the answer on the internet. Here's a list of the things I have done and the errors I run into: Migration Assistant - after getting Leopard installed by the Geniuses at the Apple Store, I come home and run Migration Assistant with my Time Capsule attached via ethernet cable. Everything runs smoothly until one of the last steps (which says under a minute remaining) "Transferring support for applications". It just sits at that stage forever and I have read online about similar issues. I read online that somebody quit out of migration assistant at that point and everything was transferred over anyways. This isn't the case with mine, as over half of my dock was filled with question marks.
Restore backup from Leopard Family Pack disc - This is the disc I used to originally install Leopard on my Mac. When i boot from the disc, I choose English as the language and immediately following that I get the message "This software cannot be installed on this computer". This happened when I had a brand new unformatted hard drive so I used disk utility and when I tried to partition it, it failed. After the Apple Store guys formatted my drive and installed Leopard, and after Migration Assistant failed on me, I booted from my Leopard Family Pack again and got the same message so I know for a fact that it is not related to the hard drive. Restore backup from Snow Leopard UTD disc - a friend of mine got an UTD disc so I borrowed it to use on my brand new hard drive. It tells me that it requires Leopard to install but gives me the option to restore from a Time Machine backup. I choose my Time Capsule and then choose my backup that it finds. It continues to tell me that it is erasing the hard drive and at the point an error message pops up saying there was an error and to restart my computer. After doing so, my hard drive is no longer formatted correctly and I have to go to the Apple Store to get them to use their USB hard drive to format my hard drive and install Leopard (starting this whole process over again)
It brings me to the screen with the apple and the spinning wheel, and it just stays there and OSX does not load at all. I'm not to attached to anything I have on my hard drive right now so I think the easiest thing might be to just completely wipe it out. The problem is that I currently have a cd stuck in my drive and I have no idea how to eject it outside of OSX. So I'd have to figure that out before I tried running anything from the install disc.
View 6 Replies View Relatedy question is : should I try to reinstall the entire operating system on to the g drive and boot from and use that as the main drive, or should I just learn how to configure all my programs to save to the g-drive. I have tons of dvds with video and data on them because I ran out of space long ago and so I am finally going to have some space so I am excited about having the g drive.I ask these questions because I have read in the past that the internal mac mini drives actually slow down the system, however I dont know if this is still true, I know the bus speed is faster etc in the new ones
View 6 Replies View RelatedToday is a bad day. My old 24" iMac has finally died it looks like and is experiencing the Gray Screen Of Death. I did have an external backup drive using time machine, so I was just going to restore it to my other iMac, but I can't find my boot disk.
I know how to do it with the boot disk, but is there any way to do it without one? I just want to restore the whole thing.
So I've come to the realization that I need a bigger HD in my MB. I'm a little confused on how to go about doing it though. If I use Super duper and put a backup of my existing HD onto an external HD. How do I restore it after the new HD and clean install of SL is done? Do I just download the super duper app again and use it to restore from the external HD?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI'm selling my old Powerbook G4. Before I let it go, I want to wipe the hard drive and reinstall OS 10.4. I also would like to run disk first aid because I suspect there may be some corruption. The problem: I still have the original system install DVDs that came with the laptop, but the DVD drive no longer works. It just spins the disks for a bit then spits them back out. I do have an external USB hard drive with plenty of free space. Is there a way I can copy the install DVDs (there's a Disc 1 and Disc 2) to the external hard drive, then boot from that drive and treat it like I'm installing from the DVDs? I also have my new MacBook Pro with a working DVD drive. Can I make my Powerbook boot from a CD in the MacBook's drive? If not, how else can I wipe my system and reinstall the OS without a working DVD drive?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI want to verify if Migration Assistant will restore a backup from NAS drive to a new computer. I just got a WD My Book Live Duo NAS drive which supports Time Machine backups for Lion (and Snow Leopard). Unlike backups in Snow Leopard and the WD My Book World Edition (white light), the new NAS drive creates a sparsebundle the first time a backup is initiated. When I open Time Machine, a single volume for my backup appears. I have 3 Macbooks backing up to this drive but when I open Time Machine on any computer, only the backup created for that computer is shown. This raised a question for me that if my computer dies, how do I restore the backup from the NAS drive to the new computer? Is this what Migration Assistant will do? What are the limitations? Does the new computer have to have the same IP address as the old computer? Can I select what gets restored? Â
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
My iMac wouldn't boot. All it would do is come up to a utility screen. So, I opted to restore from a backup (I use Time Machine that does backups to an external drive connected to the fire-wire port). I select the date of the backup that I wanted to restore and went to the next screen. When it got to the next screen where you needed to select a destination drive... it didn't find any in the system (there was no drive to select).
I assumed the hard drive died so I bought a new one. I put that in this evening and when I tried to boot the machine and restore from a backup to the new internal drive... the same thing happened. It did not recognize the new hard drive I just installed. I replaced a 500 GB Western Digital hard drive with a 1 TB Western Digital hard drive. Now I'm thinking the original hard drive is still good.
Info:
Apple Remote Desktop, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
I am running a Intel Imac 2008 clean install SL then Lion upgrade, followed by Lion Server install.I have multiple home macs, and intnded the server as a way to monitor and restrict kids internet use.In short, it has changes/screwed up multiple programs, and complicated home sharing issues considerably. Mail on the server machine has permission problems (cannot send mail, unable to sign), Spotlight in mail is non-functioning, finder spotlight searches are inconsistent, etc.I want to revert to plain old Lion.
I have done disk utility/verify disk and verified/repaired permissions, and have 'fiddled' (i'm not an expert) in the keychain/certificates areas, but I think the best solution is a clean install of Lion. When I backup to TIme Machine, is there a way to pull a 'Lion' version of my disk image back, and just not upgrade to Server? I understand I can disable Server and turn off applications in Server, but it doesn't fix my buggy machine. My options are to back up my 250GB of music, 100GB of photos, 100GB of movies, etc on to external drives, and clean install and then reimport everything, but even that will probably mean I cant reinstall my single user licesnse of MS office, VMware fusion, etc that I didn't buy on the App store.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
my system preferences froze on me a couple weeks ago while i was trying to change my screen saver. i've forced quit the program and computer, but when i boot back up, and reopen system preferences it opens up where it froze in the backgrounds settings. yesterday i shot down to see my buddy at future shop and he tried a few things and nothing changed. he called apple and they said this issue has come up a few times now. they recomended to delete a few uneeded files in the program or reinstalling the operating system. we deleted the files and nothing happened. so he told me how to reinstall the OS. i said goodbye because he left for cuba today. now i have time to do the reinstall and dont remember how he said to do this.
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MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I have two macbooks.I back up one on an external disk using Time Machine and restore it to another. I have done this a few times in the past. When I tried to do it last night, I get the following error:
[code]...
Info:MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), With 10.7.3 Supplemental update
Following Apples instructions on backing up the mail data and restoring as well as what I have so far found on the various forums has allowed me to move 99% of my mail to my new computer pretty much spot on except for one thing - the outgoing SMTP server list. Is there somewhere else I need to be looking for that information?Â
I have quite a few email accounts and with that comes quite a few outbound SMTP servers, much to my dismay I discovered that all of that information did not restore when I put the mail data all back into place. Now I assumed that perhaps it was in my keychain, but that would just be the passwords for the servers and not the list itself and the attachment of the various mail accounts to their respective SMTP servers, right?Â
So, my question is two-fold: one, is there a way to get that list back and have it attached to my 20+ email accounts and if I can do that then two, where in the keychain do I look in order to also get all those passwords back as well? It's not the end of the world, but just a big pain the butt.Â
On a side note, but related, I've also noticed that about 1/3rd of the email accounts I restored just won't log in and get mail, they just "spin" and bomb out, generally saying the password is bad even though I've put it in correctly numerous times (my mobile me account is one that comes to mind). Is this a known side effect of restoring? My only solution so far has been to delete those accounts and re-create them.Â
Info:
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I want to return to Snow Leopard from Lion (love it) for personal reasons (family). Can I use the Lion backup to restore the Leopard preferences, etc? Or will I have to reconfigue the machine with mail, bookmarks, etc.
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
When I eventually upgrade to Snow Leopard, I'd ideally like to do a fresh install (I did Tiger>Leopard as an upgrade install), but I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of reinstalling all my apps afterwards. So, would the following work as a best-of-both-worlds alternative?
1. Update my backup bootable system drive image on my external FW drive
2. Wipe the drive in my MBP and do a fresh install of SL
3. Use the Migration Assistant to automagically copy all my data and apps over from the backup drive as if I was upgrading from an old Mac to a new one
On paper at least, it looks like it ought to "just work"... but I'm wondering whether or not Migration Assistant will work between a Mac and an external drive, or does it have to be between two actual Macs?
