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Level 1

14 points

Mac Pro restore hd

Having huge problems restoring the Hd on a Mac Pro.

Started by verifying disk. It basically stopped part way through and said I had to restore hd from backup (1 to time machine hd with 16 gb free out of 982 gb used)

Tried restore. It hummed align for a few hours then said it could not continue and to start again! This was after saying it was going to Tahoe over 500 hours to complete.

Tried again. After selecting source for backup, it basically did nothing for over an hour and never did retina a restroom point ( which had eventually happened the first time). Cut power. Goes to same point as before and does nothing (spinning color wheel only)

Reboot and try a verify disk on time machine hd. It has been stuck there for hours saying it will be clone in 36 minutes.

So here we sit with a machine seemingly lost in the twilight zone with no progress of any sort on the horizon

What suggestions might you have for this one?

Thanks

Geoff

Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Matrox Triple Head To Go Display De

Posted on May 1, 2013 6:12 PM

61 replies

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 5, 2013 8:58 AM in response to The hatter

Ahh the trials and tribs

Turns out my SL is an upgrade disk so am presuming it will not install on a fresh disk?

Another teensy issue with the flash drive. ML is 4.4 and at the moment my largetst is 4.0 so gotta go shopping in the big city in a week or so.

The joys of small town living in a third world country

Thanks again. Hope I can make something work soon

Geoff

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 5, 2013 9:03 AM in response to TheWalkers

There are few if any such upgrade only DVDs, they are full installers.

It does not matter that ML is 10.8.0 - cannot tell what 4.4 even 'means' though

Flash drives for Lion/ML though need to be 8GB or larger. Does that mean something.

You will come out of this with rational paranoia! and nuts about backups.

It is only paranoia to someone that is blind to risks.

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 5, 2013 4:27 PM in response to The hatter

Well we almost made a little progress.

Zeroed the disc,got SL disc in machine and was told it could not be installed on that drive?

Would this be related to possible damage on that drive or do I need to reformat the drive again?

Several days away from going to Quito to get more drives

Fun does not quite begin to describe things at the moment

Thanks

Geoff

May 5, 2013 5:33 PM in response to TheWalkers

Use the snow Leopard DVD to erase the disk first. (quick erase is fine since you already Zeroed it one) That will remove the 10.7 Drivers and allow you to Install 10.6 on it.

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 5, 2013 6:22 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Almost thought we were on to something there but I am clearly still doing something wrrong

When I boot the machine holding down C when I boot to install from oterh media, all it does is ask me where I want to install SL then if will not go to that drive

What is the proper way to start up completely from the DVD?

Thanks so much

Geoff

May 5, 2013 6:27 PM in response to TheWalkers

Boot from the Installer DVD, but do not Install. Answer only the "what Language" question, if presented, and wait a quarter minute for the MenuBar to be drawn. Choose Disk Utility off a menu.

This is not the full blow Mac OS X you are booting, but special versions of the Darwin Kernel and Utilities made to run under it. It operates slightly differently.

If you proceed down the path to Installing, the Utilities disappear and you have to start over.

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 5, 2013 7:16 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Grant - thank you so much. That did the trick and I getting the old OSX in place ready for the long journey to eventually recovering some files from my TM (he said hopefully :-) )

Thanks again - I guess I have gotten so used to seeing nothing useful on my screens for the last week I never thought to look to see if there was an actual menu bar - duh!

Geoff

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 6, 2013 6:16 AM in response to TheWalkers

Progress has been made and functioning ok until I can pick up fresh HDs

One more big question for now. When it shuts down there is a blue screen with the spinning wheel . Start up is fine with Gary screen.

Would these have something to do with the likely damage on the drive that started this?

(Start of thread for Hatters observations?)

Thanks

Geoff

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 6, 2013 6:37 AM in response to TheWalkers

When you shutdown or restart it is not normal to have a spinning wheel but...

does it eventually shutdown gracefully?

or do you intervene?

Do you do a Safe Boot on next startup? or go to Lion Recovery and repair? reboot from the DVD and use Disk Utility Repair Disk again - might do both.

have you - hopefully - avoided adding anything ? take it slow and easy and test each brick before you put your weight on it...

yes it would be nice to make a backup of this system too, now, going forward. It also should still be a small system-only so it takes up only 30GB.

No one knows about the drive's health. You did erase/format the drive before you could install Mac OS X.

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 6, 2013 7:17 AM in response to The hatter

It does eventually shut down gracefully yes.

I did the zero thing but did not reformat the disk so that is why I asked if this might be characteristic of block problems etc

I have done none of the other things you mentioned yet as it did start up OK and apart from the blue screen, shuts down OK.

The OSX updates have been done

It also goes into PC mode fine and that drive is OK (I can go flying again :-) )

At the moment I have no spare drvies unless I erase a 1TB with a bunch of old movies on it so that will hopefully be slved in about a week when I go to Quito

The only thiing I have added so far is bookmarks in Safari, I do have work to do so that is necesary.

Are you saving I shoould also have reformatted it? That can be done now that I know how ot reinstall from DVD.

Is there a way to check the drive integrity other than Verify from the native s/w?

Again , thanks so much

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 6, 2013 7:44 AM in response to TheWalkers

Apple lingo - they mix things up / name things and yet leave out...

If you did a zero all on the entire drive, and that takes hours, like overnight or 5-8 hrs? that is more than enough.

Ever seen: "This disk is unreadable, do you want to initialize?"

Well, there is no initialize anymore.

It is done by ERASE but you have to click on the raw drive - not the second level user volume partition.

So if you click on "My Hard Drive" or just erase the volume.

If you clicked on "WD1000GBABCDV2" (or whatever drive is) THAT formats or initializes the drive and rewrites the parition table and checks the first and last 100,000 sectors that it uses.

I was afraid of moving corrupt files, apps, or restoring.

Why it takes so long... in Lion or ML it wants to save files and save the applications that are open and what windows they are in and other things. Not so in SL. Mac does WRITE changes to disk that are deferred or cached and waiting to be done, update the journal and volume information.

Up to you what you want to do at this point. If you did in fact "initialize" type Erase no need to redo.

Hope you were able to order drives to play with and shuffle your files and system .

DU Status is minimal but when you click on raw WDxxxxx will show.

I don't know what there is that is free to check drive for errors or bad sectors and just what priority to give that with everything you have going on. Overkill or overboard, but I like to see car mechanic and dentist and surgeon with every possible tool that they might need and know how to use of course.

Throwing money at a problem is fun but not always economical. You learn what works when. I'd like to buy a couple programs for myself just to see!

You still may need to buy Data Rescue 3 if the demo shows any files.

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 6, 2013 7:56 AM in response to The hatter

Data Rescue 3 would work on the Time Machine Drive?

Waht is DU?

The full zero thing took about 3-4 hours but that was done after it had been erased by a full restore attempt back before I really got into caca

And the erase was probably done at the device level, not the partition level if I recall

Not able to get hands on new drives for at least a week when i go to town. This is a third world country so services work a bit differently

But back to my initial question. Is the blue screen likely indicatve of disk errors or something else? Speculation ?

Thanks again so much eh

Geoff

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 6, 2013 8:09 AM in response to TheWalkers

DR3 is for standard drives. Haven't got any?

Dhats Disk Utility

I have not really seen blue screen long enough during shutdown / restart to know if it is just slow, is the disk drive, or video card.

Which is why I wanted you to boot from your Mac OS X 10.6 DVD and repair the disk drive.

This is one of those I was curious about, "Back in Time"

http://www.tri-edre.com/english/products/backintime_tm.html

http://www.tri-edre.com/english/products/backintime.html

- there is a trial demo too

CloneX

http://www.tri-edre.com/english/clonex.html

I don't know if CCC offers the ability to create a mini bootable clone, very useful and can put on flash drive

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 6, 2013 9:59 AM in response to TheWalkers

Ran across this service:

http://www.recovermymac.co.uk/data-recovery/time-capsule-data-recovery/

TheWalkers Author

Level 1

14 points

May 6, 2013 12:06 PM in response to The hatter

most immediate issue now seems to be that I cannot read the TM drive other than an index of folders with nothing opening in the folders. Is this to do with an earlier OSX or am I sorta screwed here?

Otherwise it is off to square one and hope most of my apps are in the App Store (unlikely!)

One more Q if I could, If I go to DL ML it seems to want to start an install. If I need to copy it to a stick, do I just do that from a file that ends up on the desktop?

Again sir my gratitude and appreciation for your help is huge.

Thank you

Geoff

Mac Pro restore hd