Restoring with no CD drive

Hello, I am trying to restore the system software on 5 iMacs (Bondi 233's) at my school. I have the CD's but the CD drives (tray load) on all 5 are not working. They are all standalones and not networked. They all start up with a flashing "?" at the moment. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you.

DaVinner, Welcome to the discussion area!
You can either fix/replace the CD drive or you will need to remove the hard drive, connect it to a Mac with a working CD drive, and restore the system software.

Similar Messages

Restoring with new Hard Drive

My dad had to clean out my hard drive earlier this year, so all my data was lost. I downloaded Yamipod, the program that takes music from the ipod. But now, when I want to add songs to my ipod, it says that it's corrupted and I need to restore it.
I tried to copy all my songs via Yamipod, but it's not recognizing it either.
The ipod still works but it doesn't work with iTunes.
I don't want to lose all my songs! Help!

Arlee wrote:
My MBPro totally crashed and just got it back from Apple with a new hard drive, logic board, optical super drive, one new 1GB ram chip, and a new video display panel. My questions are two fold, first, have I had so much replaced on this machine that I need to use Migration Assistant instead of Time Machine to restore it?
no. you can do a full system restore from TM using the restore utility on the snow leopard DVD.
Second, If I am suppose to be using Time Machine, I'm having no success! My TM backups were done on a network drive via Airport Extreme with a HD attached to it. Through the Snow Leopard disk utility,
snow leopard disk utility?? what exactly are you doing? disk utility is not involved in restoring from TM in any way.
I can access the partition with the backup on it, but then it hangs on "opening TM backup". After about a half hour, I had to do a hard shut down (no other option). I did this several times, same result. So the question is;
Can I plug the HD directly into my MBPro and restore it that way? I'm not sure if I can do this as I know the backups are different for hard wired and networked drives.
no, this is not how you should do it. connect the AEBS by ethernet. then boot from the snow leopard dvd and use "restore system from backup" from the Utilities menu. it will let you find the backup on the network and do a full system restore from it.
Or can I use an ethernet cable and plug Airport Extreme with the external drive attached into my laptop?
Thanks for any help!

Restoring an external hard drive with time machine

I'm having a problem restoring an external hard drive using time machine. I'm on a macbook Air Running 10.7.5.
The external hard drive where I store all my photos crashed a few days ago. Not a total disaster, because it's backed up, but I can't figure out how to restore the drive onto a new hard drive. When I go into time machine without the corrupted drive attached, it does not show up in the time machine browser as an option for restore. (The files are definitely there, though, because I can see them when I look at the time machine files in Finder. I'm afraid if I just transfer the files by dragging, though, I'll mess something up.) I tried using the migration assistant, but I'm having the same problem there.
Anyone know how to do this? I'm a little frantic to get my photos back.
Thanks!

I am having a similar problem. I use a Lacie external hard drive connected to an Airport Time Capsule via USB to store my itunes library. Yesterday I disconnected the external drive from the ATC and connected it to my macbook pro via fire wire to transfer 40 gigabytes of media files from my laptop to the external drive directly rather than over wifi. When I reattached the external drive to the ATC the Lacie drive didn't show up even after rebooting everything. I then disconnected from the ATC and reconnected to the laptop and now I get an error message saying the Lacie disk is unrecognizable and needs to be reformated. The Lacie drive was being included in the time machine backups so the files should be available through time machine but I don't see anyway to access them because the Lacie disk icon doesn't appear in the time machine backups. Is there another way to browse the files?
I have had issues with Lacie disks not showing up on the desktop before, particularly when transferring files from one computer to another. The transfer usually goes fine but then when I reattach the drive to the first computer it isn't recognized anymore until I reboot and it sometimes requires a couple of reboots. I initially tried to connect the external drive to both the ATC and the laptop but that didn't work, although now I'm wondering if that was because the connection to the laptop was firewire rather than USB like the ATC. In any case I currently have over a terabyte of data on my lacie that I can't access which includes my entire itunes library and backup files from multiple computers which were "cleaned" but not restored.
Disk utility sees the drive but can't verify or repair and tells me to backup as many files as possible and then reformat. Unfortunately I can't see ANY files to backup because the disk won't mount anywhere. If anyone has a recommendation for utilities to recover the files I'd be most grateful to get them.

New hard drive, restored with time capsule -- safari won't open

Just successfuly replaced my crashed 500gb hard drive with a 2TB drive. Used time capsule to restore the system (what a godsend), but now programs on the computer arent working. I tunes opens, then crashes, the app store just bounces down in the application bar for a while then stops, safari opens 80% of a page and then the window crashes and goes away. I get a feeling it has something to do with my recent repairs, but what? Any help would be appreciated. this is very frustrating.
Original system is a white intel iMac 500GB 20 inch screen EMC# 2018.

ok, sorry for being new at this, but I just tried "repair disk" and have an almost infinite array of permissions errors....so many that it crashes when doing the repair. Is this a problem with the drive itself, or the fact that i restored an entire system onto a new drive? Either way, is it fixable?

Restoring computer with new hard drive & Logic Board using Time Machine

My MBPro totally crashed and just got it back from Apple with a new hard drive, logic board, optical super drive, one new 1GB ram chip, and a new video display panel. My questions are two fold, first, have I had so much replaced on this machine that I need to use Migration Assistant instead of Time Machine to restore it?
Second, If I am suppose to be using Time Machine, I'm having no success! My TM backups were done on a network drive via Airport Extreme with a HD attached to it. Through the Snow Leopard disk utility, I can access the partition with the backup on it, but then it hangs on "opening TM backup". After about a half hour, I had to do a hard shut down (no other option). I did this several times, same result. So the question is;
Can I plug the HD directly into my MBPro and restore it that way? I'm not sure if I can do this as I know the backups are different for hard wired and networked drives.
Or can I use an ethernet cable and plug Airport Extreme with the external drive attached into my laptop?
Thanks for any help!

Arlee wrote:
My MBPro totally crashed and just got it back from Apple with a new hard drive, logic board, optical super drive, one new 1GB ram chip, and a new video display panel. My questions are two fold, first, have I had so much replaced on this machine that I need to use Migration Assistant instead of Time Machine to restore it?
no. you can do a full system restore from TM using the restore utility on the snow leopard DVD.
Second, If I am suppose to be using Time Machine, I'm having no success! My TM backups were done on a network drive via Airport Extreme with a HD attached to it. Through the Snow Leopard disk utility,
snow leopard disk utility?? what exactly are you doing? disk utility is not involved in restoring from TM in any way.
I can access the partition with the backup on it, but then it hangs on "opening TM backup". After about a half hour, I had to do a hard shut down (no other option). I did this several times, same result. So the question is;
Can I plug the HD directly into my MBPro and restore it that way? I'm not sure if I can do this as I know the backups are different for hard wired and networked drives.
no, this is not how you should do it. connect the AEBS by ethernet. then boot from the snow leopard dvd and use "restore system from backup" from the Utilities menu. it will let you find the backup on the network and do a full system restore from it.
Or can I use an ethernet cable and plug Airport Extreme with the external drive attached into my laptop?
Thanks for any help!

How do I restore from old hard drive to a new iMac ?

The logic board in my mid 2008 iMac 24" has failed just 3 months out of AppleCare. To replace this will cost me HK$ 6500. I was going to buy a new mac anyway, just waiting for the next refresh model to come out. So a new 27" i7 with highest spec and SSD and 2TB hard drive with AppleCare will cost me HK$ 24k. No brainer to just buy a new iMac rather than spend 25% of the cost to repair a 3+ year old iMac.
The hard drive is working ok so the repair centre said they will remove the hard drive for me and suggested I buy an enclosure for it , put the old drive in the enclosure and then transfer the program's, settings and files to the new IMac.
What is the best way to do this ? I obviously cannot boot up the old drive. Can I connect this drive to the new iMac and then use setup assistant to move settings and program's to the SSD on the new iMac , then use migration assistant to move the remainder of the files ( documents folder, iPhoto etc) to the hard drive on the new iMac ?
If not then any suggestions ?

Do as the repair center suggests and place the old drive in an enclosure then connect it to the new Mac.
When you first start new Mac run Setup Assistant and tell it to restore from the external drive.
It worked for me and should work for you.
Allan

Can losing connection with an external drive lead to its failure?

My iTunes library is currently wireless, through my Airport Extreme, so I can use it both with my Macbook Air and my iMac. Of course the downside is only one computer can access it at a time and I'm limited by the range of the Airport, but it works for me... Since my library is too big for iTunes Match anyways and I live in a small appartment it's perfect.
Anyways, my problem is, this setup is fairly new, and a few times yesterday while I was working on adding new music to my library (ripping my CDs in lossless), I got the error message that connection was lost with my iTunes drive!
My internet didn't seem to flinch though, which is weird. But it doesn't seem to be the "the disk was not ejected properly" external disk error that's been going around, as I HAVE that **** problem with another of my drives... (connected via cable) and it's not the same error message.
This one is just saying the connection was lost... like Airport had the hiccups or something.
Time for me to click on "ignore" and I could go back to what I was doing.
Except twice, this happened WHILE a track was importing into iTunes!
The first time, I got an error message saying it was impossible to read or write to the device... I was scared... closed iTunes, re-opened... and it looked like nothing happened! Phew. Even the freshly imported tracks were there, up the to one that was importing when it lost connection, which of course wasn't imported.
But then it happened again... while it was, again, importing...
This time, restarting iTunes didn't cut it.
When I opened Airport Utility to check, I had yellow question mark, and a message saying the attached drive was failing, or corrupted, something like that (can't remember), to plug it directly in my computer and repair it!
I did that, opened Disk Utility... and the drive won't mount.
I tried the few tricks I know, still won't mount.
So now I'm in the middle of creating a disk image on one of my other external drives (it's been hours and only a third has been done, I'm crossing my fingers it doesn't just freeze, give me an error message or tell me there's not enough space... because I couldn't check how much space was used since it wouldn't mount... and it has been a while since I checked).
I'm also in the middle of checking for data recovery with my old StellarPhoenix app... not even sure what it could do or if it still works...
But all that to wonder : can a simple network disconnection be enough to do that???
If so, how come people rely on NAS, how come so many use Airport in conjunction with external drives?! It just doesn't make sense to me...
Maybe this was just a weird coincidence? Or maybe I'm taking the problem the wrong way, and the lost connection happened because the drive was failing? In that case I just find it weird that I didn't see any sign of that while it was connected directly to my iMac, right until a few days ago!
...Gee, I'm tired of buying external drives!
For the curious, this one is a 2TB Samsung (Iomega), bought in december 2010, so just 2 years old.

Thanks edex67!
Now the question would be, are numerous losses of connection in a day normal for Airport Extreme, or is mine failing?
Can't find a model number and the serial doesn't lead anywhere, but I'm pretty sure it dates back to 2008, the second generation.
A small update: Problem seems to definitely be just in the filesystem since after formatting all seems well, while I can't restore with my disk image, as after hours of scanning it, I now get the error message that Disk Utility can't scan it because of an internal error.
Now let's hope I can save the data, because even though I regularly did backups of that disk, I would still lose those hours of new imports and organization I had just done when it failed...
I'l look for Gparted also... thanks!

Permissions problem with External Hard drive.

Hi,
I've been using my external hard drive for almost a year now and out of the blue last night I ran into a interesting problem. For some reason I couldn't transfer any files to a thumb drive and shortly after I realized I didn't have Read and write permissions for any files on my mac, and everything required my password to get to. I went into disk utility and repaired the permissions and the list went on forever. Upon completion of that nothing was resolved.
SO! I popped in my Snow leopard disk and did a repair of the permissions and system through there hoping that would fix it. I than booted up the main drive and got stabbed in the face with a HUGE error message upon the apple loading screen with a "MISSING DRIVER" "KERNAL ERROR" "CORRUPT FILE" etc.
I went back and did a restore from my external harddrive hoping that would work, and it did. I can access my time machine backups from my external harddrive but cannot do so through my own control.
What should I do? Should I reformat my external harddrive? Which would suck because I'm a paranoid freak and if something would happen during the reformatting I will lose literally over a year of work that is crucial.
error message upon opening my backup
http://s91.photobucket.com/albums/k302/nomhak/?action=view&current=Screenshot201 0-03-01atMarch1-201061.png
error message upon trying to backup
http://s91.photobucket.com/albums/k302/nomhak/?action=view&current=Screenshot201 0-03-01atMarch1-201-1.png
icon of backup drive
http://s91.photobucket.com/albums/k302/nomhak/?action=view&current=Screenshot201 0-03-01atMarch1-201062.png
Can anyone shed some light?

nomhak wrote:
I went back and did a restore from my external harddrive hoping that would work, and it did. I can access my time machine backups from my external harddrive but cannot do so through my own control.
What is that, a "clone?" What do you mean by "cannot do so through my own control."?
What should I do? Should I reformat my external harddrive? Which would suck because I'm a paranoid freak and if something would happen during the reformatting I will lose literally over a year of work that is crucial.
Again, what's on that drive? Do you have a clone and TM backups on the same external? If so, are they in the same partition?
error message upon trying to backup
http://s91.photobucket.com/albums/k302/nomhak/?action=view&current=Screenshot201 0-03-01atMarch1-201-1.png
This one says you need to repair or reformat the disk; that means your backups are corrupted.
Try to do a +*Repair Disk+* (not permissions) on it.
If there are errors that Disk Utility can't fix, or the +*Repair Disk+* option is grayed out (meaning OSX has already determined that it can't fix it), post back.

How to restore my old hard drive into a new hard drive using my time machin

My HD in my Mac Book died. Thank to the apple care Apple change it to me.
Now I have a new HD with nothing on it.
How do I use the backup in the Time Machine to restore my old hard drive?
As far as what I knew I am supposed to have all my old data, applications, and more by doing something with Time Machine.
Thanks

hi,
i have been through this. First if apple techs replaced the drive you do have something on the drive. your internal drive can boot the machine although your user settings, network settings and third-party software applications are net set up.
here's what you do.. connect the time macine drive and turn it on. now boot your macbook. watch the 'welcome movie' and don't panic. you will recieve setup instructions from the macbook. you will of course designate the system language to be english. Now an option screen will appear. there are options for setting up the new computer include using a firewire cable and transfering stuff from another macbook. ignore that option. you will see an option to restore settings from a time machine drive. bingo! choose that.
get the transfer started and go away. usb restoration of big internal harddrives by time machine is **** slow. (it should be slow for alot of technical reasons. don't blame apple.)
make sure you have the macbook plugged into an electrical outlet, not running off battery because this can be an overnight process.
so now you're good to go

I/O timeout all the time on console - what can I do with my hard drive? Macbook pro late 2011

My macbook has been extremely slow for a while and after looking on this site I discovered I should look at the console - and noticed I had I/O timeouts all the time which I gather are a problem.
What can I do with my hard drive? If I back it up using time machine and erase the disk with zeros will the problem continue if I simply restore from time machine?
Or should I invest in a new hard drive - but if I buy a new hard drive is there something on my computer that will wreck that one as well? i use final cut pro/studio a lot and it's got to the stage where I can barely use it - do I need a 7200rpm hard drive? My current one is a 500gb 5400rpm.
I have 16gb of RAM in but since upgrading this from 4GB it made a difference to the speed for all of two seconds then the computer returned to its normal slow speed.
Would appreciate any help on this issue as I'm not particularly technical.

I wouldn't worry too much about what the Console logs are showing... although I/O timeouts, if related to reading/writing to your disk may be a problem. I would have to see the whole Console message to know for certain...
Your hard drive is sure to be slowing you down with FCP. Your best bet would be to upgrade to an SSD, if you can afford it. It's the only way you're going to see a real speed increase in FCP as so many large temp/cache files are written to the drive.
If you can't afford a SSD, you may want to look at a 7200rpm SATA III drive (if your MBP supports SATA III - which model do you have? 2011 or later, I'm assuming, since you note that you've 16GB of RAM?).
You should also update your OS to 10.7.5 if your profile reading of 10.7.2 is correct. Won't help speed, but will be more reliable -> http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1582.
Clinton

How do I restore a new Hard drive from Super Duper clone ?

The Hard Drive in my 2010 iMac died and was replaced with a new one. Thankfully I have a clone made with Super Duper of the old drive. Do I just clone back on to the new internal drive ? The new drive, installed by Apple has OS10.6.8 installed on it now (by Apple ), which is the OS on the clone. Do I need to completely wipe the drive before restoring with my clone ? All that's on the new drive is the OS. Don't want to make any mistakes here.....

1. Boot from your install DVD or Bootable Clone and open Disk Utility.
2. Highlight the new HD in the list of drives and select the Partition tab.
3. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition and click on the Options... button.
4. Select GUID Partition Table in the drop down window and click OK.
5. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click the Apply button.
6. Once thats done then you can do a clean Install, restore from TM or the Bootable Clone.

I want to replace the hard drive with a larger drive

can I back up my hard drive onto Time Machine then replace with a larger drive then just use time machine to restore without reinstalling all the software?? I currently have a 5400RPM 320 GB hard drive and I want to replace with a 750 GB 7200RPM drive.

Yes you can, but I'd advise you use cloning software and another powered external drive instead, leave the TM drive as extra backup.
What you do is this. Get another external drive equal or larger than the 750GB drive.
Use Disk Utility to format this drive HFS+ Journaled.
Then download a (donations accepted, but otherwise free to use) copy of Carbon Copy Cloner, then clone your OS X boot drive to the external drive.
Hold option and reboot the computer, you will get a choice of bootable drives, including the external drive.
Once your booted off the clone, check it out and Repair Permissions in Disk Utility on both drives.
Once your happy it works good. Then make the internal hard drive switch.
When that's done, hold option and boot off the clone and simply reverse clone onto the internal drive.
You can also hold c and boot off the installer disks and use TimeMachine to restore to the internal drive.
However if there is a problem with your new internal drive or your disks are scratched, or your Superdrive fails, your might have nothing to boot from, with the clone you can option boot off of that and order a replacement drive or simply use it until the replacement arrives.
(well I guess you could place the old drive back in, then switch it out again, but it's risky working inside a machine, you could lose screws or static charge something or accidentially pull a cable, so the less inside time the better, plus you'll need the larger drive anyway to TM too.)
So you get a lot more protection that you can get online and working in a few seconds with a clone.
TimeMachine drives are not bootable, I wish they were but they aren't.
So it's best to have both methods at the ready in case one fails.
(disclaimer: I haven't used TimeMachine myself my needs are more specialized, I'm quoting second hand information and may contain inaccuracies as I'm not a TM expert)
For further information I point you to Pondini's excellent guide of the capabilities of each here.
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Clones.html

Can I restore a new hard drive from a previous time machine back-up?

Hi there,
My MacBook Pro 13 inch is 4 years old.
The computer began to freeze/stop working, so I took it to an Apple care centre and they informed that my hard drive has crashed and has to be replaced.
Luckily, I backed up my old hard drive a few days before with an external hard drive using Time Machine. My question is: can I restore this new hard drive with my old time machine backup that is on my external hard drive? If so, how do I do this?
Thanks

Of course! If you couldn't, Time Machine would be rather worthless, now wouldn't it?
For instructions, see:
How do I restore my entire system?

Using Bootcamp with 2 hard drives in MBP

I'm going to install a second hard drive in my laptop. Here is what I have and what I'd like to have...
My current setup:
750 GB hard drive
Partition 1- Everything Mac related
Partition 2- Windows 7/BOOTCAMP
The setup I'd like:
60 GB SSD- Mac OS, Mac Applications
750 GB hard drive
Partition 1- Everything else Mac related
Partition 2- Windows 7/BOOTCAMP
Can this be done? If bootcamp is already installed on a partition on the 750 GB hard drive, can I just pop the new SSD in, install Mac OS X, and use the previous Mac partition from my larger drive (partition 1) for Mac files? Or will I need to reinstall Windows 7 to get it to work properly with the newly installed Mac OS X?
Thanks a lot for the help!
-Grant

About TM "Backup Drive is Full"
TM only deletes older files if they have been deleted from the source and when TM needs space on the backup drive for a new incremental backup. Time Machine "thins" it's backups; hourly backups over 24 hours old, except the first of the day; those "daily" backups over 30 days old, except the first of the week. The weeklies are kept as long as there's room.
So, how long a backup file remains depends on how long it was on your Mac before being deleted, assuming you do at least one backup per day. If it was there for at least 24 hours, it will be kept for at least a month. If it was there for at least a week, it will be kept as long as there's room.
Note, that on a Time Capsule the sparsebundle grows in size as needed, but doesn't shrink. Thus, from the user's view of the TC it appears that no space has been freed, although there may be space in the sparsebundle.
Once TM has found it cannot free up enough space for a new backup it reports the disk is full. You can either erase the backup drive and start your backups anew or replace the drive with a larger drive.
Having a sufficiently large enough backup drive doesn't prevent this problem but it can help provide a longer period of time before the problem occurs.
If this is something of concern for you then you should opt to use a different type of backup utility and a different backup strategy.
Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
SuperDuper!
Synk Pro
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

Magically Restored Files after Hard Drive Replacement? Confused...

Ok so I don't really need help, but I'm confused as to how this is possible.
Okay, so my backyard got struck by lightning a week ago. My Macbook Pro was working fine after the strike until like 2 days later when it started kernel panicking on start up and wouldn't boot OS X. Took it to the genius bar, they said they probably needed to replace the logic board. 5 days later, I go to pick it up and they said they had to replace the logic board, hard drive, superdrive, and some other cables inside. I asked if my data was lost, and they said they tried to restore it but they couldn't and recommended to go to an outside tech person to try to recover it if it was really important but didn't recommend it because it would be very expensive because they would have to essentially rebuild the hard drive. I was upset because they said they would call me if they had to replace the hard drive and I was never notified. The guy felt bad for me, so they let me keep my old hard drive instead of sending it back to apple for investigation or whatever. So I leave the Apple store, and turn on my computer to make sure it works and lo and behold all my stuff is there. I checked to make sure documents worked and all my music and photo files opened correctly.
So I am happy that I didn't lose anything, but very confused as to how a replaced hard drive contains my old data when the Apple store said they couldn't get it back. And I still don't know what is on the hard drive they gave me. I'm pretty sure they actually did the replacement because I signed a sheet stating that they did so.
So could the apple store have just been confused? i've been trying to figure it out and can't understand how all my stuff is magically back. and i don't know what to do with the hard drive that they gave me. any thoughts on my magically reappearing files?

Hi r,
I suspect neuro is correct, but if you're still curious, one more thing you could do is purchase a connector or enclosure for the HD they said is your old one, and see if it will mount when connected to another Mac. If so, open it and check it out to see if it really is.

Restoring with no CD drive

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