restored TM ** to an external drive won't boot

My Hard drive is toast so I restored my TM backup to a different partition on the external drive that contains the TM file. I am led to believe that this restored file will allow me to boot up my computer even though the Hard drive is not functional. When I do this it seems to work but as the apple icon comes up and it seems to be loading properly before it finishes it crashes the system. I have tried booting directly from the external and also from the Leopard CD and the Tiger CD that came with the system all crash when the external is selected. Any suggestions I really need to use my computer and the Hard drive is still under Warranty and it could take me a while to get a new Hard drive into it.

Mac book Pro 15", Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jan 4, 2010 6:01 AM

17 replies

Beast159 Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 8, 2010 2:53 PM in response to Pondini

Well I have to thank you so much because I installed the new Hard drive and then did a complete TM restore and my laptop is working, as far as I can tell, perfectly. I did not lose any of my pictures or my itunes. After I backed up my iphoto and itunes on an external, I tried to run TM again and it says preparing for a long time and then says TM back up failed and it says not enough room for back up.
Did I do something wrong? I turned off TM as soon as I got access to the newly restored system.
TM saved my life and I want to get it working properly as soon as possible.
P.S. Just a reminder that I use Airport Extreme and that is how I tried to run back up that failed, maybe I should hook it up directly which is how I did the full TM restore??
Thanks again.

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jan 8, 2010 3:01 PM in response to Beast159

Beast159 wrote:
Well I have to thank you so much because I installed the new Hard drive and then did a complete TM restore and my laptop is working, as far as I can tell, perfectly. I did not lose any of my pictures or my itunes. After I backed up my iphoto and itunes on an external, I tried to run TM again and it says preparing for a long time and then says TM back up failed and it says not enough room for back up.
Did I do something wrong? I turned off TM as soon as I got access to the newly restored system.

No, but you forgot why the last paragraph in #14 of the FAQ Tip advised you to turn it off: TM's first backup after a restore will probably be a full one: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338

If your TM drive isn't well over twice the size of the data on your internal HD, your best bet is just to erase the disk/partition with Disk Utility (connect it directly to your Mac for that).

Then I'd strongly advise you to connect to the Airport via Ethernet for the first, full backup.

P.S. Just a reminder that I use Airport Extreme and that is how I tried to run back up that failed, maybe I should hook it up directly which is how I did the full TM restore??

No, that won't help. If Time Machine decides to do a full backup, you can't prevent it.

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restored TM ** to an external drive won't boot