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Cant restore my macbook with Disk utility and my .dmg image

My macbook would not boot anymore. Stuck on gray screen with apple logo, spinning wheel and a loading bar for a while after shutting off.
I was able to get to Disk Utility in the recovery mode and, after a while, was able to make an image of my filesin an attempt to back them up.

The .dmg was put on an external and i checked it on my imac, i could open the .dmg file and browse all my files from my macbook, so those are safe!


After that i tried to wipe the SSD of my macbook and put the image back but that didn't work, also some resource is busy errors.

After trying this a few times without succes i figured i'd try to do a clean install. This worked.


My macbook air is working again but if Iuse Disk Utility in the recovery now and try and restore my image (.dmg file) it gives me Restore Failure; An error (-16) occured (resource busy) as well. I also tried to copy the dmg onto my macbook and run disc utility when booted into OSX. I open up the back up .dmg with Disk utility, then i go to my macbooks partition (Macontiosh HD) and use that as a destination and drag the mounted image as the source as shown on the image below. Am I doing something wrong here?

User uploaded file.

Doing this i get an error as well: (-119,930,878) Resource busy as you can see.



What can i do to get my image back on my macbook? Any 3rd party software?


I considered just transferring the files after opening the .dmg file but this works only for documents and not for programs and settings of the default apps.



I've looked all over the Internet and it seems more people have had this error but then with making the image, they also suggest unmounting the destination disk before trying to restore but my destination is Macintosh HD, i cant really unmount that can i?


Thanks in advance!

Posted on Sep 28, 2013 12:16 PM

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1 reply

Sep 29, 2013 9:19 PM in response to Yorick88

To make a clone, in the future you need to use a program like superduper or carbon copy cloner.


Either program makes an identical clone while preserving certain system files and marking/indicating to OS X that the clone is bootable.


Using Disk Utility to make a DMG was a good idea, but this will not yield a bootable image.

If Disk Utility could do a 1:1 copy of everything, then people would be using it to rip/duplicate DVDs.


But Disk Utility does not (it leaves out certain invisible/system files), hence it cannot duplicate/clone a hard drive or DVD.

Cant restore my macbook with Disk utility and my .dmg image

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