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Time Machine Backup from a bootable drive

I have an issue with my mac book pro. I'm getting the prohibited sign.


I tried holding option and loading up my Bootable Flash drive and my time machine drive, but it still gave me the prohibited sign.


Eventually, I was able to used a bootable flash drive of the Os. Although it did have to wait 10 minutes as it flickered between the Apple logo and prohibited sign.


When I am in the macOs utilities, I have access to a few tools like the Terminal, I even used it to copy a few files. Which means the hard drive seems to be fine, but it may be the logic board or something.


Anyway, I want to copy all the stuff off of the drive so that I can restore using the backup drive. The time machine section in macOs utilities is only for restoring but not transferring.


Is there a way to mimic a time machine back up in the terminal?


As I said earlier this hard drive is showing up in disks utility and all of my files are still there. I wanted to try a system restore to see of that fixes it. My previous back up is at least 90% the same as my system now, so I can possibly afford to forgo backing up the drive in the current state but I prefer not to.


2nd Question:


Whether I am able to backup my drive or not, if restoring it doesn't change anything what should I do?

Posted on Dec 15, 2017 5:40 PM

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Posted on Dec 16, 2017 3:39 PM

Get an external drive with no data on it. Try booting into the Recovery Partition (command - R on a restart) and select the old drive in Disk Utility/Restore, then select your Internal Drive in Restore from. Select the new drive as the destination. This will likely reformat the external drive erasing all data.

11 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Dec 16, 2017 3:39 PM in response to macjsus

Get an external drive with no data on it. Try booting into the Recovery Partition (command - R on a restart) and select the old drive in Disk Utility/Restore, then select your Internal Drive in Restore from. Select the new drive as the destination. This will likely reformat the external drive erasing all data.

Dec 19, 2017 12:25 PM in response to macjsus

The 2 places I’ve seen recommended most to buy reliable RAM are below. I have purchased RAM several times and a hard drive from Other World Computing and have always been very satisfied with the product and service. They have on-line instructions on how to replace the RAM. OWC has also tested RAM above what Apple states is the maximum. I had 6GB installed on an early 2008 iMac supposedly limited to 4 GB and noticed an improvement.


Crucial


Other World Computing

Time Machine Backup from a bootable drive

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