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Restore Failure: not enough space on /dev/disk2s2 to restore

New MacBook Pro with Lion all up to date. Have 9 partitions (plus the two hidden ones). Operating system is on one with 125GB. 82.72GB are used and 42.28GB are available (says disk utility). I want to "restore" to an external hard drive. I don't care if that partition is bootable or not. It is 124.48 GB and 124.26GB are free. When I try to do the restore, I get the message in the subject above.


Background. I've been doing exactly this for 8 years on my two previous macbooks. It used to be that you could do this with the computer running, but it didn't always work. Now you have to unmount the partition to restore it, which seems more likely to work. In other words, you have to restart and go into recovery mode. Irritating, but if it worked better it would be worth it. (Only have to do this for the operating system partition. Easy to backup all the others and that's been done. However, I would really like to back up the operating system partition.) I have always found this an easy operation. You could copy your computer onto an external drive, replace the computer's hard drive and copy things back, all using restore in disk utility. Obviously, if I can't copy the partition off to somewhere else, I'm not going to be able to copy it back if I ever need to.


It is true that the OS partition just points to /. Is it possible that restore wants to carry along all the other partitions as well and that's why there isn't enough space? If so, this is a bug, since OS has always pointed to / and there has never been a problem before.


I am moderately paranoid because I have lost enough hard drives in my life. I do have time machine but I read that if you backup from it, it wipes out your recovery partition. I'd like to have both my time machine and my restore copies.


I'm thinking of packing up the external hard drive and the computer and making an appointment at the apple store. Help very much appreciated.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 8GB memory 750GB disk 13"

Posted on May 20, 2012 7:35 AM

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13 replies

May 20, 2012 8:41 AM in response to Linc Davis

This may well be true, but it bothers me for two reasons


(1) It was never true in the past.


(2) You wouldn't be able to restore back to your computer. If, in order to copy your OS partition on to a hard drive, you had to use a bigger partition, then when it came time to copy (restore) your external version back to your computer, it would say it wouldn't fit, because the computer's partition was smaller than the external drive partition.


You suggest using Finder. How would you do that? Finder doesn't even see half of the stuff on the OS partition.


Steve

May 20, 2012 9:42 AM in response to Linc Davis

Guess that was ambiguous. I don't care if the copy is bootable from where it is, but I certainly want to use it to make a bootable copy back on the computer in case I need to fix a broken computer.


I'm now using Carbon Copy Cloner to see how it goes. Seems silly to have to do that after successfully using disk utility for 8 years on two different computers (not counting the kid's). Over the life of each computer disks have grown and I've replaced them and just dealt with the change with disk utility with no problems.


Disk utility seems to be broken now, at least from my point of view.


Steve

May 20, 2012 10:11 AM in response to W Stephen Wilson

W Stephen Wilson wrote:


Disk utility seems to be broken now, at least from my point of view.


Disk Utility's restore function never was quite good to begin with, very dumb.



You'll like Carbon Copy Cloner, it's the best, and it's smart.


Especially the huge control it gives and the fact that you can update the clones and even save states between the updates as backups.


Best of all it will copy EFI and Recovery and "fit" to upgrade to larger or smaller partitions if the data will allow it. The scheduling ability is a nice feature too.


I use it for auto-updating and/or reminding me to update clone on another partition on the boot drive and external drives every few days or weeks or so, depending upon my needs. So it's nice for the fact that I can scheduale many clones on seperate hardware.


All my clones are option key bootable, plus the files can be accessed directly by any platform that can read the HFS+ format, I'm not locked into using or restoring only to another Mac.


Freedom is good, TimeMachine is the absolute purist evil as a backup system. (just kidding, it's ok for some 😉)




BTW, if you want your data to be a lot more reliable on hard drives, you should perhaps read this.


Reducing bad sectors effect on hard drives

May 20, 2012 11:14 AM in response to W Stephen Wilson

W Stephen Wilson wrote:


...(2) You wouldn't be able to restore back to your computer. If, in order to copy your OS partition on to a hard drive, you had to use a bigger partition, then when it came time to copy (restore) your external version back to your computer, it would say it wouldn't fit, because the computer's partition was smaller than the external drive partition...

I'm no expert but having run into this myself, I think you're describing a Catch-22 which seems to have first appeared with Lion. And unless I missed something, I also found it true with CCC, and its Support page says this about block copying: "The destination volume must be at least as large as the source volume, plus two blocks (usually 8KB)." So even if you make enough room going out, there won't be enough room coming back unless you switch to a larger drive or partition.


In addition, the need to unmount the partition to do a Restore limits you to a block copy. With Snow Leopard and earlier, if you used Restore to back up the volume you've booted from, a file copy rather than a block copy is done, and that, presumably, also defragments your boot drive on the backup. That is helpful if you have enough partitions and/or drives to use the backup as your new boot drive, as I just did, backing up my SL drive and then installing 10.7.4 on the backup.


This is only a guess but I suspect that as Apple moves away from media (i.e, install disks) to the cloud, the plan is to do a fresh install booting from the Recovery HD Partition, then use Setup Assistant to migrate everything that's on the backup you made using restore or Time Machine. Not the way I'm used to doing it but I'm old-fashioned.

May 20, 2012 11:30 AM in response to FatMac-MacPro

FatMac\>MacPro wrote:


W Stephen Wilson wrote:


...(2) You wouldn't be able to restore back to your computer. If, in order to copy your OS partition on to a hard drive, you had to use a bigger partition, then when it came time to copy (restore) your external version back to your computer, it would say it wouldn't fit, because the computer's partition was smaller than the external drive partition...

I'm no expert but having run into this myself, I think you're describing a Catch-22 which seems to have first appeared with Lion. And unless I missed something, I also found it true with CCC, and its Support page says this about block copying: "The destination volume must be at least as large as the source volume, plus two blocks (usually 8KB)." So even if you make enough room going out, there won't be enough room coming back unless you switch to a larger drive or partition.

That is true, but the cloning operation is not a Block Copy, it is a File Copy, the size limitations do not exist in this mode.

In addition, the need to unmount the partition to do a Restore limits you to a block copy. With Snow Leopard and earlier, if you used Restore to back up the volume you've booted from, a file copy rather than a block copy is done, and that, presumably, also defragments your boot drive on the backup. That is helpful if you have enough partitions and/or drives to use the backup as your new boot drive, as I just did, backing up my SL drive and then installing 10.7.4 on the backup.

I'm confused by this, to restore you simply boot from the clone, use CCC to restore to the volume you want it on, nothing else is required.

May 20, 2012 12:21 PM in response to FatMac-MacPro

Okay, I used CCC in a mindless (i.e. no thinking, no options) way to copy my OS partition. Obviously the default isn't block copying and it went smoothly and painlessly. I checked it by booting from the external CCC made drive. Worked fine. I'm set, but find it unsettling that I had to go outside Apple to do what I've done inside Apple for years. It suggests a degrading rather than an improvement. Worse, I feel obligated to give CCC $$, which I will do. (Obviously I'm not unhappy about CCC.)


Steve

May 20, 2012 4:08 PM in response to Csound1

Csound1 wrote:


...I'm confused by this, to restore you simply boot from the clone, use CCC to restore to the volume you want it on, nothing else is required.

I was simply referring to what W Stephen Wilson was referring to: the change in the functionality of Restore in Disk Utility, not CCC. Restoring from the boot volume in DU defragmented the boot volume in the process while restoring a different volume from the boot volume didn't. Lion no longer offers the first option.


On the other hand, it's been quite a while since I've tried CCC, since until Lion, DU did the job quite well. I'll have to take a look at the latest version; with the advent of Lion, it now appears to be much more flexible than DU for my purpose.

Sep 30, 2013 3:53 AM in response to W Stephen Wilson

You stiill can use disk utility. You just have to resize the partition on the source disk down to the size of the smaller disk (see the partition option on the main disk, not any of the partitions). I had your same problem last night, but when I resized the partition on the source disk down to the size of the destination disk, it worked. Since the amount of data is the only thing that matters, everything is the same when you restore. Now i am running the same os on my 160gb hd that was running on my 250gb. Since i am not using the 250 for an os anymore, i can either resize it back to its original size or reformat it for something else. From my experience, no need to pay, disk utility is still going strong (well, i guess you did pay apple)!

Restore Failure: not enough space on /dev/disk2s2 to restore

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