Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
My 6-year old MBP17 just lost its logic board. It is now officially a paper weight. My Q: Can I boot-up an old Mac Mini from the Time Machine backup created from my laptop (until I purchase a new MBP) ?
Thanks...
No, you can't boot from a Time Machine Disk.
No sorry, TM backups are not bootable. You would need an actual system clone for that (as made, say with SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner - these do a bit-by-bit clone of you system which is bootable).
You will be able to restore everything to your new machine once you get it though.
What OS were you using on the MBP? If it was Lion you can boot from a TM backup disk but all it will give you is the TM version of the Lion Recovery HD. Which won't be much help is using any programs or files in the TM backup.
You might want to consider taking the 6-year old MBP17 hard drive and use it as an external USB Drive . Then you could migrate your data to the new box and eventually use it as a bootable clone for backup.
Yes, a local Time Machine backup volume will boot into Lion Recovery, provided that at least one of the source volumes backed up to it has a valid recovery partition under Mac OS 10.7.2 or later.
Can I boot from an time machine backup on my external drive ?
