How do you get Mountain Lion (OS 10.8) back from a time-capsule back-up

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Level 1

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How do you get Mountain Lion (OS 10.8) back from a time-capsule back-up

I have a Macbook Pro Late 2008 model which was running Mountain Lion (Mac OS 10.6) and for Christmas I received a new hard drive. I backed everything up on my time capsule and installed the new hard drive and now I can't get my original operating system back. The laptop came with OS 10.5.8 (Leopard) and I installed this with the original disk but when I try to restore my back-up from the time capsule it won't let me because the back-up is running a newer version of Mac OS. I can't download Mavericks because Leopard doesn't have the app store. It seems that the only way to do it is to buy a hard copy of Snow Leopard from the apple store and wait for it to be delivered, which is what I'll have to do if there is no other option, but I thought I'd check here first if anyone had any experience of this problem. Unfortunately I don't have the snow leopard disk, I don't remember ever installing snow leopard (I thought I went straight to Lion but it would seem thats not possible without the app store) but I guess I must have borrowed a disk from a family member or something.

Anyone had any luck restoring a newer operating system from a time machine backup? Is this even possible?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Dec 30, 2013 9:33 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,111 points

Dec 30, 2013 9:55 AM in response to redwood_tree

See if any of this helps...

http://pondini.org/TM/14.html

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Answer 2

redwood_tree Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 30, 2013 10:38 AM in response to BDAqua

thank you. I came across this before and I did what it says on the instructions but when the backup finished and the laptop restarted it went into a loop of kernal panics, which I assumed was because I was trying to restore with a newer version of mac OS. Eventually had to start up in disk utility and wipe disk and reinstall from the original disk.

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

239,111 points

Dec 30, 2013 10:45 AM in response to redwood_tree

Hmmm, are you back to the OS version you want now?

Sounds like Maybe the Backup is corrupted from whatever is the likely reason you're trying to restore for!?

Hold CMD+r keys at bootup, do you still have a Restore Partition to Reinstall ML/10.8x from?

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Answer 4

redwood_tree Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 30, 2013 11:08 AM in response to BDAqua

I ended up putting the old hard drive back in because I thought I was probably going to have to order the Snow Leopard disk from Apple and needed some of the information on my old drive. But before I changed back I had to reinstall the old OS system (leopard) because I couldn't get anywhere with the backup. Whats the restore partition? There was an option to restore from time machine, is that what you mean?

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

239,111 points

Dec 30, 2013 1:35 PM in response to redwood_tree

Yes, any Disk that had 10.7, 10.8, or 10.9 on it should have a hidden Restore Partition, which can be seen holding alt key at startup, or CMD+r keys to boot from the Restore partition.

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