Cannot clean install- Only time machine works

Hello!
I am currently running into aa few problems with my Macbook pro 15" mid 2009 laptop. I have had some troubles with the computer consistently beachballing, and freezing up so I decided I had enough and wanted to start from sqaure one. So I bought new Ram (corsair 2x 4gb 1066MHz), and a new hard drive (Seagate Momentus XT 500gb) and subsequently installed the two.
Now for the root of my problem- I cannnot for the lfe of me get Lion or snow leopard to install! It gets about 80% of the way and the installation will fail saying to contact the software manufacturer. Luckily I have a bootable external drive which I have used for diagnostics and I am coming up empty. Disc utility is claiming the drive is perfectly fine, and Memtest is saying the ram is fine. I was searching for a solution so I decided totry and install from a time machine backup which worked fine. Very weird.
Any ideas on what would cause my computer to reject a clean install?

You may have a hardware fault. Make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store to have the machine tested.

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Mavericks Clean Install now Time Machine won't work

Was having probs with Mavericks upgrade so decided to do clean install. Did TM backup and wiped main HD and check it then installed Maverics.
Performed migration to get Applications & Data back all seemed fine. TM showd all back up from before install.
TM reported fail on next day backup so I open TM to see what was there. I was shocked to discover all backups gone except one following migration and in progress backup that failed. Never asked if old back ups to be deleted just disappeared.
As all apps & data on main HD I reformatted and Checked TM disk all fine. TM starts backup of HD around 750GB to TM 2TB disk. After many hours it reports an error occured, no details what so ever what error was. Have reformatted again and tried again same. Is this Apple saying my 4yo IMac needs replacing, do they need more money or am I missing something, have read TM support files that dont help.
Any advice would be great. Thank you.

What kind of external drive do you have and do you have software installed that came with it?
Pete

Clean install, migration, time machine

I am not a MAC OSX specialist in any way, but I would like to share what I have found out the hard way about the clean install.
1) Never do this unless you are absolutely sure that you have complete back up. Time machine cannot restore to the latest backup status, it can only go back to full backups and those are not made very often. In my case it was July 29, 2012. What a surprise! . Do the vital backups by hand. I propose copying your home folder to an external disc or usb pen drive. Copy Application folder as well. Why? If you are fond of iWorks'09 and hate new versions and you do clean install your favourite software is gone. You may just as well erase your Time Machine disc and start backup from clean drive. I didn't do it.
2) Make copies of your mails.
3) If you purchased software outside AppStore make notes of serial codes. Mail backup helps.
4) When making USB drive bootable do it this way: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=18081307&postcount=3 it preserves RECOVERY partition which is needed for FIND MY MAC option and it is usefull to have it anyway. Place the USB intended for clean install directly into your MAC, don't use USB hub.
5) Migration assistant never worked for me. The reason might have been that my last full Time Machine backup was done 18 months ago, and it was 10.8... I have read quite a lot about getting restore from the Time Machine, and dwelled on the subject myself.
I can't give explanation why that happened but that is found out the hard way:
- I discoverd that long name of the user should be different than the one you used before clean install.
- After doing trial and error attempts I made short user name the same as in my user before clean install, and started it with a capital letter. Why? That gave me access to my time machine. When the I had a different short user name than stored in time machine then upon entry into time machine all the backups well dimed and going back was not possible. With the same short name the backups were accessible. The system complained that I had no permissions to access the folders. But that is possible to change. When you look up Time Machine folders in Finder, those that are restricted to you have got red circle with a white line inside. Ctrl click on the restricted folder and select Get info. Add yourself as a user that has the access and change permissions to read and write. Your Documents folder appear in every back up in Time Machine. The best it is to change the permissions in the latest backup.
At the end of the day I managed to recover my mail. Data from other programs and my old MBP is up runnning again and faster. It takes however, a lot of work to make it.
The biggest pitty is that I lost my Pages v4.3 and now don't have an option to recover it.

Are you sure its not shown? It should have a yellow or green icon, and list the name of the system and HD that was backed-up, not the one it's on.
If not, try to repair the backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

How do a clean install from Time Machine Backup which is in other partition of internal hard drive

I have 2 partitions in my internal hard drive they are
1. Mac OS (Sysem Files)
2. HDD (Other Personal Documents).
I did Time Machine Backup in HDD partition. So now i want to do clean install from the Time Machine Backup without format the whole drive since my system not booting meant that system crashed and cant boot in anyway (Just consider ). Also I have MAC bootable USB stick.
Thanks in advance .

Having never seen a setup like that, I'm not sure how it will work.
In theory, just erase the Mac OS volume, then install, choosing to recover from a Time Machine backup.
When you boot into Recovery, open Disk Utility and select the Mac OS volume, not the whole disk. Erase it, then quit DU and restore from the Time Machine backup. However, this is the part I'm not certain of. I would imagine the partition with TM backup will be mounted, but I don't know.
If you can't see the Time Machine backup from the Recovery HD on the drive, try it from the USB Recovery stick (it is a Recovery USB and not the old Lion install USB, correct?)
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718
If you don't have a "built-in" recovery HD because of your partitioning, then you would have to boot from that USB Recovery disk.
Your setup is severely flawed. A backup on the same drive as the data is not a backup. You will lose everything with a disk failure.
Also, partitioning off your OS on a Mac is not necessary and is probably counterproductive. OS X is not Windows.

Hard Drive Erase, Clean Install and Time Machine

I am currently running OS X 10.10.3 and I want to do a clean install. All my content is backed up with Time Machine via external drive.
First, how do I erase my hard drive and install a fresh version of OS X 10.10.3?
Second, is it better to use a USB drive for the clean install or just you the Recovery Mode?
Last, once i finally have a clean installation of OS X 10.10.3, am i able to access my external drive via time machine to bring back some of my old files...i have read that the folder in the external drive is not accessible and not accessible through time machine.
I appreciate the response and guidance!

Hello Jacob,
All of these are good questions to have when erasing and installing OS X Yosemite. To answer your first question you would need to boot to either your Recovery HD or through the Recovery USB and follow the steps in the first article below. Either option will get the task accomplished and will install OS X Yosemite. For your final question about restoring from a Time Machine back up, you will see the option to restore when going through the setup process of your Mac. Let me know if the information below is of help or need further assistance.
OS X Yosemite: Erase and reinstall OS X
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18869
OS X: About Recovery Disk Assistant
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202294
OS X Yosemite: Recover your entire system
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18848
Take it easy,
-Norm G.

Clean install vs. time machine recovery after installing new HDD

Hello All,
I have got actually two questions, but I think I only can do one issue at the time. Anyway: Here are my specs and question:
1. I have got a 2010 MacBook Pro with a 320 Gb HDD which seems to be on its way to lala land (crashes almost once every quarter year)
2. I have backed up my Mac with TimeMachine to uptodate
3. I have created a boot disk and purchased a new 1 Tb HDD to be installed
4. I plan to install new HDD in a bit
So here is the question:
Shall I make a clean install of Mavericks (and if so, how do I get all my e-mail and other data onto the new HDD), or should I just go with the latest TimeMachine update?
(Also: If I partitioned the HDD and designate one only for apps and the other only for data, how would I do that?)
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. ... thanks, theo

Thank you for your swift responce and help
So this solution would remove the "clutter" and restore performace?

Clean install from Time Machine

My Macbook started to get slower over the last couple of months.
Last month I lost about 10/7500 records in cash book.
I did Verify disk in Disk Utility which recommended reinstall.
I did backup to Time Machine.
Then did Erase Disk.
Now restart computer (holding down command-R) and get message to instal from internet.
How can I install from the Time Machine.
I have another MacBook Pro ,on OS X 10.7.5.
Hoping someone can help.
Regards, David.

When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.
Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

Clean Install VS Time Machine for "out of the box" performance

Hi all ^^
Just under a year a go I made the leap of PC to Mac and have never looked back, im super happy with my Mac however I have been experiancing a decrease in performance since Ive been using it, back when I was using a PC I clean installed the OS once a year and then proceeded to add my files back, thus restoring my PC to full performance.
Ive been reading around these forums looking at Time Machine backups, hoping to see 'how much' gets restored when you perform a recovery from time machine, and from what I have read is that everything gets restored. So my question is purely for some advice and clarification
"If I want to restore my Macbook to its "out of the box" performance, Is it viable for me to use a Time Machine back up?"
if not
"If Time Machine Back ups wont help restoring performance, Would it be possible to Clean Install and then extract purely the Files from my TM Back up?" I read another user had issues, the Mac recognised the files belonged to another mac and he couldent use them.
So I wont waffle on any furthur, but im looking for the easist way to clean install or restore performance to my Mac, a long term solution I can use each year
Please and Thank you
Em

Thankyou for your answer
Im quite a clean freak when it comes to my PC, I keep my desktop bare, things I dont use remain unloaded.etc
I think as I am without a Defrag or Disk Clean up tool I feel abit helpless to maintain optimal standards. I not very experianced with the in's and out's of computers but all I really want on my Mac are my Files, Applications and the OS, nothing more.
I appreciate your time and experiance, so ild ask instead: In your experiance is it worth performing a clean install? I have hadly any junk on my Mac, and from the tone of your post you beleive a program such as MacKeeper would be sufficent?
Futhurmore a clean install once a year isnt worth it? I depend alot on what people have told me, so I may have fallen victim to a rumour :S

Clean install and time machine

I'd like to reformat my hard drive and do a clean install of leopard. I've backed up my drive with time machine and I'm wondering if it is possible to recover all my third party applications etc etc including passwords and settings without having to reinstall them all from the original discs?

Hello Jacob,
All of these are good questions to have when erasing and installing OS X Yosemite. To answer your first question you would need to boot to either your Recovery HD or through the Recovery USB and follow the steps in the first article below. Either option will get the task accomplished and will install OS X Yosemite. For your final question about restoring from a Time Machine back up, you will see the option to restore when going through the setup process of your Mac. Let me know if the information below is of help or need further assistance.
OS X Yosemite: Erase and reinstall OS X
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18869
OS X: About Recovery Disk Assistant
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202294
OS X Yosemite: Recover your entire system
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18848
Take it easy,
-Norm G.

Someone meet the problem, I am not abble install mac OS 10.6 snow leopard on intel based machine, (intel core 2 duo, 2,8 ghz, 4GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, OSX 10.5.8) system every time wrote "OS X snow leopard cannot be install on this machine" please help, Majo

omeone meet the problem, I am not abble install mac OS 10.6 snow leopard on intel based machine, (intel core 2 duo, 2,8 ghz, 4GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, OSX 10.5.8) system every time wrote "OS X snow leopard cannot be install on this machine" please help, Majo

It is retail disk, i bought it in apple store. I also resetter PRRAM and SMC and checked disk. I also tried clean installation and upgrade, nothing works, after run installation program after few seconds wrote: OS X Snow Leopard cannot be install on this machine :-(
Thank you for your answer
Majo

My MacBook w/ OSX 10.6.8 cannot access my external Time Machine Backup USB Drive. It says it is a Read Only drive. When I went to change permissions I found all pernissions were listed as "Custom" and I could not reset them to "Read Write". Any help!

My MacBook w/ OSX 10.6.8 cannot access my external Time Machine Backup USB Drive. It says it is a Read Only drive. When I went to change permissions I found all pernissions were listed as "Custom" and I could not reset them to "Read Write". Any help would be appreciated.

This can be done easily with ethernet.
Please follow the instructions strictly.
To make it easier I want you to do this overnight so you can turn off all your current connection to the internet.
Just go to the airport fan in to the top right and turn airport off.
Get ethernet cable and connect the laptop to the TC lan port.. ie <-> ones.
Press and hold the reset on the TC for about 10sec. until the front led flashes rapidly.
Open the airport utility.. go to manual setup and change the wireless to off. (so other people around you cannot join your network of one).
Ignore all the errors.. they won't stop the backup working.
Go to the TM and reselect the backup target disk as the TC.
It should start after 2min and run through to completion.
That is it.. for a backup of many GB it might take a few hours.. so make sure the laptop has power plugged in and the sleep is off.. (on early ones I think this is needed but I am a late arrival to the scene).. sleep doesn't affect later OS.

Time Machine working great but now want to back up an NTFS USB HD also

Got my Time Machine working well backing up my whole system onto a 1TB LaCie USB Hard drive formatted: Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
However I regularly use a 500GB LaCie which is formatted NTFS (where all of my MP3s are located on for iTunes) and would like this to be included in the Time Machine Backups.
I installed NTFS-3G to make this data accessable and editable etc.
After a few hours of trying, I still cannot seem to get this drive to backup. I made sure it wasnt an exception in the Options Tab.
Anyone know what it is I am doing wrong?
Cheers
James

This is from CCC's Help section:
+Supported configurations+
HFS formatted partition or hard drive+
+Hard drives in Firewire, eSATA and USB enclosures including Firewire-based iPods*+
+CCC will not backup directly to optical media (e.g. CD-ROM or DVD-ROM)+
+CCC is supported only on machines that officially support Mac OS X Tiger (or higher)+
and:
+Mac OS X is installed on an HFS+ filesystem. The HFS+ filesystem defines many types of metadata that describe non-data attributes of your files. Creation date, access control lists, permissions and ownership, Finder flags, and extended attributes are among the various metadata types defined in the HFS+ standard. To adequately back up all of your files and their associated metadata, CCC requires that your backup volume is also formatted as HFS.
+Additionally, Macintoshes can only boot from hard drives partitioned with either the Apple Partition Map (APM) scheme (PowerPC- or Intel-based Macs) or the GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme (Intel-based Macs). The hard drive icons that you see in the Finder are volumes. The partition scheme of a hard drive describes how volumes are physically defined on the hard disk. Every hard drive has exactly one partition scheme and at least one volume. When you "partition" a hard drive, you simply create multiple volumes on that hard drive.+
+See the section of CCC's documentation labeled "Preparing a hard drive for use with Carbon Copy Cloner" (in the "General overview of the features of CCC" section) for step-by-step instructions for partitioning and formatting a new hard drive for use with CCC.+
I use it or SuperDuper to create a bootable clone; however, when I just want to copy certain files, I just use the drag 'n drop method - it just works.

Java(TM) Update (1.4.2_02-b03) cannot be installed on this machine...

I am able to install the 1.4.2_02-b03 JRE package on Windows 2000 Pro (SP4).
However, the 1.4.2_02-b03 SDK package does not install: some way through the process (the file copy stage) a modal dialog is displayed ("Warning - Java(TM) Update
Java(TM) Update (1.4.2_02-b03) cannot be installed on this machine because the Java(TM) Virtual Machine is currently running.
Please close all running Java(TM) applications, especially browsers.
Retry Cancel
---------------------------") and when Cancel is clicked, the main MSI installer program displays an Error 1722 modal dialog ("A program failed to execute blah blah...") and the MSI program announces installation has failed, nothing has been installed, and so on.
The MSI log in the temp directory displays "Error 1722.There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action patchsdk, location: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Java\Update\Base Images\j2sdk1.4.2-b28\patch-j2sdk1.4.2_02-b03\patchsdk.exe, command: -s "C:\Programs\Java\SDK\"
=== Logging stopped: 06/11/2003 23:53:02 ===
Examination of the installation directory (C:\Programs\Java\SDK in my case) shows that program files have been copied (and it looks complete), but the Java applet in the Control Panel does not show that the JRE in the SDK directory has been registered as a JRE choice (normally it is in the drop-down list of available JREs).
So what can I do? Both 1.4.2_01 SDK and 1.4.2_02 SDK show this problem; 1.4.2 (FCS) does not. The problem also occurs with the IFTW installers.

I think I found a <fix> for this. I was having the exact same problems on 10 different WinXP and Win2k machines. I found a couple things may help on some systems. Try installing the following updates:
WinXP: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=322913
Win2k: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/recommended/q322913/default.asp
You may have better luck installing 1.4.2 after installing these patches. I did on SOME systems. Otherwise, when installing 1.4.2 and you come to the point where it asks you to "Retry" or "Cancel" just keep on clicking on "Retry" until it installs successfully. Sometimes this may take 50 times sometimes once. But it will install.
Sometimes I found that if I opened taskmanager, then close it, clicking Retry would work after that point.
The moral is: Just keep clicking Retry!

"10.4 cannot be installed on this machine?"

I'm currently running 10.4.7 on my macbookpro. To make a long story short, I was partitioning my hard drive using bootcamp when I get the error message saying basically, "can't verify hard disk. run off your installation cd and repair disk."
I get into problems when I try to run off my tiger CD. I have a total of three tiger CDs of different versions (10.4 retail, 10.4.6 that came with my MBP, and a 10.4.7 version that was mailed to me from ADC). I've tried them all, and each time I get the message, "MAC OSx cannot be installed on this machine."
I can't restart holding C either. Anybody know what's going on? Thanks in advance.

Hi Horn,
the problems are evident for the 10.4 retail: There is no retail version of Tiger for Intel Macs. Retail versions are PPC only. Also check the 10.4.7 DVD. It might be a PPC-version as well.
However, you SHOULD be able to boot from the software restore DVD that came with your MBP, so calling AppleCare is definitely a good idea.

Is it ok to carbon copy clone internal hd to the only time machine back up copy?

I Only have 1 external hd that is the only time machine backup copy of my internal hd.
wwould I risk losing the backup if I ccc internal to it?

If the external drive is large enough, and has enough free space, just use Disk Utility to create a new partition to clone to, that way you won't interfere with your TM backup.
For instructions see "Create new partitions on a disk" (About half way down the page) in:
Disk Utility 12.x: Partition a disk
You may be able to create new partitions on a disk without losing any of the files on the disk. Each partition works like a separate disk. You may need to create a new partition if you want to install multiple operating systems on your computer. You can also create partitions to help organize your files.
As a precaution, back up your data before creating new partitions on your disk
Open Disk Utility, in the Utilities folder in Launchpad.
Select the disk where you want to create a new partition and click Partition.
Select an existing partition in the Volume Scheme list, and click Add (+).Disk Utility splits the partition into two, leaving the data from that partition in one of the new partitions. If the partition is less than half-full, Disk Utility creates two partitions of equal size. Otherwise, it creates one partition large enough for the data, and another partition with the remaining space.
Resize the partitions as needed.You can drag the dividers between the partitions in the Volume Scheme list, or you can select a partition in the Volume Scheme list, and then enter a value in the Size field.
Choose how to format the partitions that will be erased or created.For each new partition, select it, enter a name, and then choose a format.
Click Apply.
Creating a new partition on the external drive will not cause you to lose data.
Keep in mind that this will significantly reduce the amount of space available for TM, and thus, will reduce how far back in time TM will maintain a backup. If you are planing on making this a permanent thing you might want to invest in a second external drive in the near future.

Cannot clean install- Only time machine works

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