Can't see time machine drive and can't boot

Last week the internal hd on my Mac mini (mid-2010) began failing. I took it in and AppleCare replaced the drive. The genius told me they loaded 10.7.3 and I should be able to use Time Machine (TM) to bring it all back. So I go home, plug in my TM drive and the Mac can't see the drive the TM is on. And yet I know it recognizes the drive because if I turned it off it would give me the nasty warning about disconnecting before unmounting. So not knowing what to do I went and popped in the installation disc that came with my Mac mini (10.6), and booted with the cd. I told it to restore from TM, and this time it sees my drive and transfers the data. When it restarts I get the gray screen with a null (not permitted) sign. So I can't make heads or tails of it an decide that maybe I have to make a clean install and then upgrade to 10.7.4 and then try time machine (I'm grasping at straws now). Only when I attempt to to restart after installing 10.6 it go from a gray screen to a blue screen (of death) and just sits. I'm baffled and don't know what to do. Could my time machine disk, which was backing up a failing internal HD, have been bad? What do I do?

Hello:
If I were you (and I am not), I would bundle up the repaired computer and your Time Machine drive and take it in and ask the Apple person to bring it back to life. IMHO, that should have been done the first time.
Barry

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After Kernal Panic can't see Time Machine Drive

I have a usb iSub speaker.
Apparently it is NOT compatible with Leopard but I have been following certain threads with interest as I hate to sell it just yet.
Yesterday there was a post that said if you go into Audio MIDI Setup and change some settings, then change them back- your iSub will work!
Well when I was in the Audio MIDI Setup utility I experienced a kernal panic (first since using Leopard)
After that I was not able to boot past the Grey Apple Screen.
I even left it overnight and it would not start.
I finally reverted to my old Tiger backup external drive- I booted to that, then started my Tiger DVD,
I ran Disk Utility, then Repaired permissions and I am back up and running.
My Time Machine hard drive is not showing on my desktop though! (I have 2 external drives- one is my old Tiger cloned back up with SuperDuper- the other is my TimeMacine backup)
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One other thing...it seems to be writing....the case the hard drive is in has lights on it and it is blinking..and I can hear it slightly.

Hello:
If I were you (and I am not), I would bundle up the repaired computer and your Time Machine drive and take it in and ask the Apple person to bring it back to life. IMHO, that should have been done the first time.
Barry

Lion can't see Time Machine drive that Snow Leopard does

We just set up a backup system for our group. It's a 8 Tb Pegasus drive attached to a Mac Mini Server. I have set up 4 Macs running Snow Leopard with no problems at all. Two systems are running Lion and I can not get Time Machine to see the backup drive. We are connecting via AFP on a network.
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If I'm understanding correctly, your 4 SL machines work fine with the drive. Your Lion machines do not seem to able to see the drive in TM.
But your Mini server is a Lion server correct? It can browse and backup to the Pegasus on its own right?
The link Linc cited is related to an issue with older storage devices that use legacy AFP and no longer work properly with Lion machines. Even if the legacy is enabled you can only browse the drive and can set the drive for TM, but will not be allowed to use it for TM (TM errors will say as much). But this Promise Pegasus? is a brand new Thunderbolt using product entirely which subsequently makes me think that can't be the case at all.
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How about LAN traffic firewall? Any chance you have the AFP port blocked internally?
I briefly flipped through a manual on the Pegasus... and it doesn't even offer any hints on time machine or shared usage. I guess there isn't anything particular on the disk side to do besides plug it in and the disk arrangements.
OS side... buggy sharepoint setups? TM usage is a selectable function for any particular sharepoint. I'm not sure how you are setting it, but have you tried to create a sharepoint on the Pegasus (a folder stored on it and not the root) and share it out with TM allowed? You should be able to see that at least.

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Hi. Trying to cut this short.
I Tried installing osx 10.8. Halfway through the installation it told me I didn't have enough free space. Helpful.
i tried to restore from time machine, the back ups were viewable, but it said i couldn't as the disk was in use or couldn't be un mounted.
Ive now deleted the hard drive and reinstalled 10.7.5.
Set up couldn't restore from time machine back ups as it couldn't find them.
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I've rebooted in recovery and

Seems my text has vanished. This site is terrible on my iphone. Would expect better.
I've rebooted in recovery and tried to restore from time machine but again it won't find the back ups.

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This seemed to be a problem with mounting the Time Machine sparsebundle from the old MBP.
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As you have indicated, you don’t want to touch the partitions on your existing external drive because it has live files in the FAT32 partition for which there are no copies anywhere else. That leaves you with two sets of data that are currently not backed up: your FAT32 partition and your system drive. I suggest you need at least one more external HD for backups.
A “backup” drive should never have live files on it because should that drive fail all the live files on it would be lost. So you need a second external HD anyway for a proper backup scheme.
I would partition a new disk as you have the current one and then copy all the FAT32 files form the old disk to the new one. Then you can try repartitioning the old drive. I would then setup a backup scheme to periodically clone the new FAT32 drive onto the old FAT32 one, using the new disk for your live FAT32 files and dedicating the old disk to backups. You could also continue using the old disk for Time Machine backups.
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http://help.bombich.com/kb/usage-scenarios/backing-up-tofrom-network-volumes-and -other-non-hfs-volumes

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The drive on my wife's MacBook Air went bad and we got it replaced at the Apple Store. She started the Air, went to restore her files from her Time Machine/Time Capsule backup and her backup was not listed.
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Hello, there's some corruption on the HDD, try this...
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/06/22/reset-os-x-password-without-an-os-x-cd/
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http://www.hackmac.org/?q=node/4
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Sallymuffin wrote:
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What do you mean? Does the disk not appear in the window? Or nothing happens when you select it and click Use Selected Disk? Or ??
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I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I think Leopard must be optimized for Intel Macs, and I'm guessing my problems have to do with using a G5. Anyway, I have a 250G start up drive and a 500G second hard drive which I've been using for Time Machine back ups. A few days ago I began getting errors that time machine could not complete its back up. No details whatsoever.
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thanks!

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Can't see time machine drive and can't boot

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