Hard drive or o.s failure re: time machine?

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Hard drive or o.s failure re: time machine?

10.6.8 server with USB ioSafe hard drive for client backups. I am reinstalling the operating system on one 10.8 client. Everything goes fine until I start the time machine restore. Once it starts restoring, it gets to 18 or 19 minutes remaining and hangs there. Looking at the mounted backup volume (either via Finder or via ls) on the server and it appears completely blank! No files or directories on it at all.

The drive cannot be unmounted for repair. However, rebooting the server and remounting the hard drive causes the files to reappear. Disk Utility repair reports the drive is okay.

My question: is the hard drive failing or is this some weird operating system problem?

Mac mini, OS X Server

Posted on Jan 23, 2013 8:16 AM

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Answer 1

Jascha Lee Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 24, 2013 12:41 PM in response to Jascha Lee

Same thing happened using Migration Assistant. I'm now doing another re-install, but with the drive locally attached via USB.

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Answer 2

Jascha Lee Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 24, 2013 2:08 PM in response to Jascha Lee

With the drive locally attached, the o.s. install process was not able to see it. I had to skip the transfer, then mount the sparse bundle file and run Migration Assistant on that. Got a lot further, complained that network settings couldn't be transfered, but drive was left in a similar state: the sparse bundle files were listed, but were zero length and Disk Utilitity couldn't unmount the volume to repair it. Rebooting, remounting, and repairing. Going to try migrating again...

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