Help - restore from time machine freeze

I set up a clean install of Mountain Lion, which seemed to go fine... then restarted the PowerBook and settled back to let Time Machine restore my apps and documents.
It took about six hours... but then, when the process had wound almost all the way down, the countdown clock got stuck at "17 minutes"... and it's been there for the last three hours.
I'm afraid something has gone wrong, but what can I do? I could force restart the Mac, but then what? Wipe the disk and start all over? Or will Migration Assistant be smart enough to know what I missed?
Arrrgh

This happened to me a while ago and when I restarted it finished the migration and all worked out OK.

Similar Messages

  • My MacBook pro is freezing at the "moving items into place" phase. I have to restore from time machine each time. I'm talking about the 10.7.4 update

    I can't seem to get the 10.7.4 update to work. It constantly freezing at the "moving items into place" phase. I let it run overnight and it's still frozen. I have to restore from time machine backup each time. Any help appreciated.

    this is somethinng like the third post i have read about that update causing troubles...
    But if I read this right- it is still in the install? Had you restarted and repaired permissions BEFORE the download? As well as emptying cache in safari first?
    The other troubles I read had to do with after install, and caused by...oh what was it...it was early morning...an article at CNET news had it...google 10.7.4 update trouble and read the cnet one.

  • Trying to restore from Time Machine - HELP please

    I tried to restore from time machine this morning...and am getting this error :good morning, "an error occurered (2) while copying, there is no such file or directory"
    any idea?????
    TIA

    lol, it didn't say goodmorning.
    Last night my mac froze, i had to turn it off buy the button on the back...i tried to turn it on, it just hangs at the gray screen with the apple on it and the little circle things goes around and around and around. I put in my leopard OS disk and went to utilities to do a disk scan repair, it said no valid packages found...i dont know what to do with that...Ithought i could do a simple restore from my time machine...what you saw above is the error i got...
    I don't know what to do or how to get my machine back to normal.
    Can you help me?

  • I cannot able able to start my macbook and then i started my mac in a recovery mode now mac os X utility window opens with 4 options 1. Restore From Time Machine Backup 2. Reinstall Mac OSX 3. Get Help Online 4. Disk Utility if i try to restore my mac wit

    i cannot able able to start my macbook and then i started my mac in a recovery mode now mac os X utility window opens with 4 options 1. Restore From Time Machine Backup 2. Reinstall Mac OSX 3. Get Help Online 4. Disk Utility if i try to restore my mac with time machine no option appears if i reinstall from Mac OSX error comes and cannot able to recover from disk utility please help how can i reinstall mac OSX

    Guitar21,
    your MacBook Pro has booted into its Recovery mode. From the OS X Utilities menu, select Disk Utility. On the left-hand side of the Disk Utility window, select your internal disk’s boot partition (typically called “Macintosh HD”). On the right-hand side, press the Verify Disk button if it’s not greyed out; if it is greyed out, or if it reports that errors were found, press the Repair Disk button. Once the verification/repair is completed, exit Disk Utility and select Restart from the Apple menu to restart in normal mode. Does it get to the login screen now?

  • Help Upgrade to Maverick fails - now unable to restore from time machine as well

    Hello,
    I have an iMac (2008) which was running snow leopard. The App store reminders to upgrade for free to Mavericks got me today and I decided to go with the upgrade. After the down load of the s/w and while rebooting, it prompts for user id and password.
    My iMac has always had an user id and a password. But strangely it would not accept the valid password for the user id. I have retried it several times and it will not accept the password. Not knowing how to proceed, I wanted to revert back.
    So I pop in the Snow Leopard bootup DVD and when it starts, I connect to my wifi and choose utilities to perform a time machine restore. The backup was done just prior to my upgrade to mavericks. I am able to mount my external network storage and locate the time machine backup and choose the disk to restore to and the process starts and after a few minutes it aborts.
    There is a log file that is shown - but the contents are not easily understood.
    Now I have and iMac that is not functional. I am looking for some help.
    I would be open to installing Mavericks from scratch - but I do not have the bootable USB. I would like to use my network drive and use that to start my computer with Mavericks and then possibly extract the data from my time machine backup. I am hoping that the restore of my data files / pictures / documents etc can be restored from time machine.
    Any ideas how I can proceed from here? Thanks in advance.
    ifmx4ever

    MichelPM,
    Have been offline all along. I resorted to your advice and went with installing Snow Leopard on the external hard drive booting the system on that.
    I first tried recovering my Time machine backup - but did not work. So I ended up installing Mavericks on the internal hard drive on my iMac first. Then I was able to connect to my Time machine backup and restored all my data and documents. I chose not to recover the applications. The only useful app that I used was office for mac 2011. I went to microsoft's website to do a fresh install of office for mac 2011 and I am back in business.
    Overall a painful way to get an upgrade done. On to my next task - preparing a bootable drive with Mavericks and to back up on Time machine.
    Thank you for your suggestions.
    ifmx4ever

  • HT1379 I had to restart by resetting the NVRAM/PRAM.  Now I have a window showing OS X Utilities.  My options are restore from Time Machine Backup (which I could do), Disk Utility to repair or erase, get help online or reinstall OS X.  What should I do?

    I had to restart by resetting the NVRAM/PRAM.  Now I have a window showing OS X Utilities.  My options are restore from Time Machine Backup (which I could do), Disk Utility to repair or erase, get help online or reinstall OS X.  What should I do?  The problem began when I tried to restart my computer and the only thing I saw was the grey screen, Apple logo, and the timer; the computer wouldn't restart from there.

    I searched through trouble shooting options on the Apple Support page and was able to make it this far.

  • Restore from time machine does not list all my backups.  I know they exist but there dates are not present on the restore list.  Any help appreciated.

    Restore from time machine does not list all my backups.  I know they exist but their dates are not present on the restore list.  Any help appreciated.  If I must use one of these older dates to restore, how do I then get the more current data off time machine?

    Ok, so am i correct in saying that the steps to fix are as follows.
    That's one option, but not what I meant by restoring in the time-travel view. The latter is what you get when you enter Time Machine.
    is the fresh install not going to be able to "see" the time machine backups that I have at the moment.
    It should, but sometimes people report that it fails. I'm not sure why that happens.

  • HT4718 Installed new hard drive, click on restore from time machine, get to 'select a destination' but just keeps searching for disks.. any help please?

    Installed new hard drive and want to restore from time machine.
    Get as far as 'select a destination'  then it goes no further - just keeps 'searching for disks'
    Help anyone please?

    1. Be sure your drive is attached and mounted.
    2. If you have already written any data to the drive, back it up before proceeding to the next step.
    3. In the Finder, choose Go > Utilities. The /Applications/Utilities folder will open.
    4. Launch Disk Utility.
    5. Click the icon for your external hard drive in the sidebar on the left.
    6. Click the Erase tab along the top of the window.
    7. From the Volume Format menu, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
    8. Enter a name for the external hard drive in the Name field.
    9. Click the Erase button.
    Make Sure that you choose the correct drive

  • HT1338 Attempt to install Mountain Lion has highlighted need for internal disk repair. Even after "repair" ML still says disk is damaged. Attempt to restore from Time Machine back-up failed - cannot 'see' internal HD to restore to. Help!

    Attempt to install Mountain Lion has highlighted need for internal disk repair. Even after "repair" ML still says disk is damaged. Attempt to restore from Time Machine back-up failed - cannot 'see' internal HD to restore to. Help! Has attempt to install ML caused these problems or just highlighted existing need to Repair Disk? Even so, why can back-up from Time Machine not see the internal drive to restore to?

    Csound1, William & Sig .... thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I fear you are right - I'll need a new disk. I'm booked in at the Apple Genius Bar in Bordeaux, France on Wed ... quite a challenge as my French isn't great! The current internal disk is 500gb, does anyone know whether I can upgrade my 21.5" iMac (circa Oct-2009 vintage) to a larger size internal disk, 1Tb or even 2Tb? I already have one external 2Tb drive and another one on order (I have masses of media stored and more planned as I've just taken up photography). Seems a bit of a pain managing with only 500gb internal storage. OR, can you advise me on how I can store all my photos on my new 2Tb external drive - I can't seem to figure out how to set the path for iPhoto to see them (I can't even figure out where they are stored right now!). Same with iTunes, how do I set the default storage to the external drive (I moved everything manually and then imported them all from the new drive - it worked but seemed very convoluted). Any advice on how to manage multiple drives gratefully received. And thanks again for previous replies.

  • I want to erase from Leopard and restore from Time Machine, help!

    I'm about to reinstall Leopard and I want to zero all of my internal hard drives and start fresh. (im trying to get to the bottom of a kernel problem).
    Anyways last night I did a Time Machine backup to a new 2TB WD HD. Everything appears to be backed up fine, but I want to make sure I can restore from Time Machine before I go and do this.
    Please let me know if there are any precautions I should take into consideration or if there is a good way to go about doing this.
    Thanks!

    You could try restoring your backup to a new drive before you over-write your working system. That will allow you to test your backup and skills before risking too much down time.
    Add a drive large enough to restore the backup to and boot from the Leopard DVD. After you choose your language you can get to the Utility menu to restore Leopard from a TM drive.
    Here's a pretty good "walk thru" on the entire process:
    http://duncandavidson.com/blog/restoringfrom_timemachine/

  • IPhoto 09 - some recent events lost after restoring from Time Machine

    recently my early-2009 iMac hanged during boot up on the white screen. so i a restore from Time Machine and it works. this freezing occurred twice of the last one week, which i did 2 restore to last backup. then i notice there's an issue with iPhoto 09. i notice some latest events which supposedly been backup during the restore point, appears 'blank'. when i enter Time Machine, i see all previous events but the recent day or two, it just turn out to be black squares, and when i enter the events there weren't any photos but just files with names.
    i tested again but loading in a couple of new photos into iPhoto yesterday night, back it up and double check in Time Machine, it is (the new photos) there. about 6-hours later i make a check again (on Time Machine), the photos event became the black square again. this is really a pain for me as i have lost enough photos
    i desperately need help on this. anyone?
    here a couple of the screenshot from my Time Machine:
    http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t272/mujiland/Screenshot2010-05-29at104554PM. png
    http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t272/mujiland/Screenshot2010-05-29at104602PM. png

    Hello mook,
    So if I understand:
    1.) The goal is to restore the iPhoto Library from a point before the issues started happening
    2.) When you try to go backwards in Time Machine while inside the iPhoto window you get a blank Library when you get to the date range you want.
    What to do:
    - As you cannot seem to access the iPhoto contents using the iPhoto window I would suggest the following:
    1.) Navigate using the Finder to ~/Pictures (or whatever folder you are currently housing your iPhoto Library in)
    2.) Rename the current iPhoto Library to something else (Like iPhoto Library Old etc)
    3.) While looking at this Pictures window, activate Time Machine and go back in time to a date when YOU ARE SURE iPhoto was working fine and had the images you want
    4.) Click on the iPhoto Library in the Time Machine window and click on Restore
    -- This will restore the Library from the date in question
    -- You will have 2 libraries once the restore is complete. The freshly restored library and the old library. Keep the old library just for safe keeping until such time as you determine you have all the pictures you want. Then you can do whatever you want with it (trash it, etc)
    Hope that helps.

  • Restoring from Time Machine doesn't work

    I am attempting to restore from Time Machine on my 13" Late 2008 MacBook, but the restore stops about halfway through.
    Some background information: A few weeks ago my computer started exhibiting some weird behaviour.  It would turn the disk off or log me out after a few hours (I typically sleep with it on and use at as my alarm clock).  Then, apps would crash and quit unexpectedly.  It would kick in the HDD when I was not using anything that required it, and the fan would turn on for no reason.  Then the worst thing happened: Some days I would get the dreaded "You need to restart your computer" screen multiple times.  It almost seems like a virus.  The problems persist after multiple PRAM and SMC resets.  Sure enough, I tried turning on my computer yesterday and it just won't even start.  It would give me the Apple logo, a spinny loading indicator, and then it would give me a very slow progress bar.  As soon as the progress bar gets to about one tenth of the way, the computer turns off.
    I have everything backed up to a very recent Time Machine.  I opened the computer in Recovery Mode and verified the disk.  It needed repair.  So I repaired it, and it said the repair was unsuccessful and needed to be restored.  So I tried restoring it.  I ended up having to erase Macintosh HD and reinstalling Lion (which thankfully I could do over the Internet).  After reinstalling that, I tried "Restore from Time Machine."  It got to about 30% of the restoration and then took me back to the Utilities page spontaneously.  It didn't give me an alert or an error of any kind.  It has done this multiple times.  I may try Migration Assistant and see how that works.  I know that a 4-year old MacBook is a bit of a dinosaur anyway, but the machine has been very useful and powerful for the whole time I've had it, and this is not how I'd like to see it die.
    I also have a lot of important data on the Time Machine and fear that whatever afflicted my MacBook may afflict the MacBook Pro I intend to get soon, which I will load my TM onto.
    Any and all help is deeply appreciated.
    -Sam Taylor

    I have always had problems restoring from my backups.   I just replaced my hard drive and did a restore and now there are no icons in the dock (all ?'s) and I cannot click on my Applications folder in any finder window.  (Oh, and the fans run constantly at top speed after being on for about 3 minutes.) 
    This is probably the 10th restore I've done in the past couple of years and I don't think one has worked for me. 

  • How to restore from Time Machine WITHOUT install discs using a second Mac

    It's a question that is asked repeatedly all over the web by Mac users like me that bought in to Time Machine (TM) on the assumption that if their computer died one day it would be a piece of cake to restore from it, only for that day to come and then to be told "ahh, okay the first thing is to get your computers install discs..." (loud crashing sound of world falling around ears).
    I've never been able to afford a new Mac and both of my machines were bought second-hand. Neither came with Leopard (both have Tiger and have been upgraded to Leopard via the net). This was never supposed to be a problem as I've been backing up with TM. However it appears that Tiger discs are as much use as an inflatable dart board when it comes to using TM. So I've been faced with the possibility of having to spend £130 (about two hundred Pres Sheets, Yankees) on the Leopard install discs just so that I can have the option of restoring from TM. Bonkers.
    However after much nashing of teeth, a very long weekend learning all sorts of things about 'Target Mode', 'Single User Mode', 'Verbose Mode', 'Open Source 9' etc the following solution has worked without the need to go out and buy those over-priced discs...
    What you will need:
    1 broken Mac requiring restoration
    1 second donor Mac running Leopard (or Snow Leopard so long as the broken Mac can run it)
    1 firewire cable with the correct fitting at either end to attach both Macs together
    1 Time Machine backup
    Note: The following is for when you have given up trying to boot from your hard drive. In my case I couldn't boot in to Safe Mode etc. so was forced to format my drive and re-import everything. If you've read this far I'm assuming your at the same point as well and have tried everything else that's out there first.
    Also - both my Macs are Power PC's so can't run Snow Leopard, so I can't say 100% this will work with SL (Intel) machines. From what I've read Snow Leopard will work with this procedure too, but if you've found differently please feel free to add your experiences below...
    STEP ONE: Format the corrupt Hard Drive or replace with a fresh HDD
    *Link the two computers with a firewire.
    *If you're replacing your HDD, remove your corrupted hard drive from the 'broken' machine and insert a new one.
    *Power up the broken Mac whilst holding down the 'T' key. This will start it up in Target Mode and you'll get a nice firewire symbol floating around that machine's screen.
    *Power up the second 'healthy' Mac. This will be our 'donor' machine. When it starts up after a few seconds you will see the hard drive of the broken Mac appear on the donor Mac's desktop.
    *Using your donor Mac's 'Disc Utility', format the broken Mac's hard drive (now's the time to partition it etc. if you want to).
    STEP TWO: Clone your donor Mac
    Your broken Mac is no longer broken and now needs a new OS. But you don't have the discs, right? Well get this... you can clone your donor mac on to your machine, even if they are totally different i.e. a laptop on to a tower.
    *Again using Disc Utility, click on your donor Mac's hard drive. The restore tab appears as an option.
    *Click on restore and drag the donor Mac's hard drive that contains the operating system in to the Source box.
    *Drag the newly formatted hard drive on the broken Mac in to the Destination box.
    *Click restore. Your donor Mac's hard drive will now be 'cloned' on to your no-longer-broken Mac. Once this is done, eject the first Mac's hard drive from your donor Mac's desktop. You no longer need the donor Mac.
    Ta daa! Your machine now starts up happy and smily again. Time to restore all that stuff that's been sat on your Time Machine drive...
    STEP 3: Restore from Time Machine using Migration Assistant
    This is the really clever part that prompted me to write this piece in the first place. Time Machine IS accessible without those Leopard install discs you don't have. You need to use something called 'Migration Assistant'.
    *Start up your machine as normal and you'll see it is an exact clone of the donor machine. Weird huh?
    *Attach your Time Machine hard drive. It will show up as an icon on the desktop and because of it's size, you'll be asked if you want to use it as a Time Machine backup. Err, NO YOU DON'T! Click 'cancel'.
    *Open Migration Assistant (if you can't find it just type it in to Finder and click). There are three options, the middle one being to restore from TM or another disc. Yup, you want that one.
    *Migration Assistant will now ask you what you want to restore in stages, firstly User Accounts, then folders, Apps etc. It will even import internet settings
    And that's you done. Let Migration Assistant do it's thang... altogether I had about 140gb to restore, so it wasn't exactly speedy. This wasn't helped by the fact that my TM hard drive is connected via USB (yes, I know). Just leave it alone and it'll whirr happily away...
    Before I go - you don't have an option of when to restore from, and will restore from the last Time Machine save. At least then you should be able to access TM and go 'backwards' if you need to.
    Also - for a Mac expert, the above will be up there with 'Spot Goes To The Farm' in terms of complexity. However, for the rest of us the above is only available in fragments all over the net. By far the most common response to 'how do I restore from Time Machine without install discs' is 'you can't'. If I'd found the above information in one place I could have saved a lot of hair pulling and swearing over the last couple of days, so forgive me for sharing this workaround with the rest of the world. Meanwhile your expertise will come in very handy for the inevitable questions that will get posted below, so please feel free to help those people that won't be sure if this solution is the right one for them. I'm no expert, I just want to help people that were stuck in the same situation (and looking at the web, there's a LOT of them).
    Hope this is of use to someone, thanks and *good luck*!

    Most maintenance and repair, restore and install procedures require the use
    of the correct OS X install DVD; be it an original machine-specific restore/install
    disc set or a later retail non-specific general install disc set.
    By having an unsupported system, perhaps installed via an illegal download or
    other file-sharing scheme, where no retail official discs are involved and the
    initial upgrade was done by other means outside of the License Agreements,
    you are asking us to discuss a matter of illegal installation and use of a product.
    There are no legal complete OS X system download upgrades online; only bits
    that are update segments to a retail or as-shipped machine's original OS X install.
    +{Or an installation where a previous owner had correct retail upgrade discs, &+
    +chose to not include them with the re-sale of the computer it was installed in.}+
    However, to answer the initial question. To get and use an externally enclosed
    hard drive in suitable boot-capable housing, and get a free-running Clone
    Utility (download online; often a donation-ware product, runs free) you can
    make a bootable backup of everything in your computer to an external HDD.
    This is the way to make a complete backup to restore all functions to the computer.
    The Time Machine has some limits, in that it can restore only that which it saves.
    It does not make a bootable clone of your entire computer system with apps and
    your files, to an external drive device. A clone can. And some of the clone utility's
    settings can also backup changes to an external drive's system; if that other drive
    is attached to the computer correctly.
    Carbon Copy Cloner, from Bombich Software; and also SuperDuper, another of
    the most known software names you can download and use to clone boot-capable
    system backups of your computer's hard disk drive contents, are often cited.
    However you resolve the matter of the running OS X system in your computer,
    derived from what appears to be questionable means, is part of the initial issue.
    Since you do need to be able to fix an existing installation by unmounting the
    computer's hard disk drive and run the computer from the other (install disc or
    system clone) while it is Unmounted; and use the correct Disk Utility version to
    help diagnose and perhaps be able to fix it. You can't use a Tiger version Disk
    Utility to fix a Leopard installation, and so on.
    So, the situation and replies as far as they can go (since the matter does
    constitute an illegal system, if it was arrived at without correct discs) is a
    limited one. And file sharing of copied Mac OS X (and other) software is
    also considered illegal.
    And, one way to get odd malware and unusual stuff, is to get an unauthorized
    system upgrade from an illegal source online. You never know what's inside it.
    The other reply was not a personal attack; the matter is of legal status and as
    you have a product with a questionable system, the answer is to correct it.
    And if you want to save everything in your computer, make a clone to a suitable
    externally enclosed self-powered boot capable hard disk drive. With older PPC
    Macs, that would best be to one with FireWire and the Oxford-type control chips.
    However that works out...
    Good luck & happy computing!

  • Imac won't restore from time machine backup after HD (hard drive) recall replacement

    I have an imac bought in 2011, running Snow Leopard.  It required an HD replacement due to the 1 TB Seagate recall - the replacement was done by a certified Apple repair station yesterday.  Before the guy left he started a backup/restore from my latest time machine backup set.  It failed.  I attempted it two times and got error messages that it failed and the computer needed to be restarted to try it again.  No luck.  I called the guy back and he told me to call Apple Care.  Not thrilled about that response since the guy had just left my house I did what he told me to do.  (A quick sideline here:  I recognize that a time machine backup should be no big deal and SHOULD work everytime, but it doesn't.  It irks me that Apple is replacing my HD through no fault of mine and yet they don't allow the restore of data to be a "covered" expense in this process - this isn't just because this was an authorized repair guy - the Apple store would have done the same). 
    Back to the issue.  When I called apple care they pretty much had me try the same thing again with an earlier back up set.  To my knowledge, it didn't work.  I say this because it looked like it was working and when I came back to the imac later, it had restarted and once again booted to the OSX install.  (The boot disc is still in the imac).  When I tried to boot from another location, one did not show up to boot from so I assumed that the data didn't transfer and it forced another restart.  So, I tried something else.  I tried to re-install the snow leopard OSX without using the restore function.  That appeared to work and then when the machine restarted it asked if I had another mac and I chose the option to get the files/apps/etc. from my time machine backup.  The computer chose what I can only assume is the most recent backup set (It chose what I know to be a subfolder that appears under the dated backup folder - Macintosh HD--which btw is confusing seeing as that's always the name of the HD on the imac).  I again stepped away from the computer so it could do its thing for two hours.  When I returned, I was back to the MAC OSX screen that asks you to choose a language.  There were no more options to choose DISK UTILITY or RESTORE FROM BACKUP, etc.  When I clicked on English it took me right back into the screen where you say whether you have another Apple that you want to transfer data from.  I realized that the imac must have restarted and I assumed maybe it was because the boot disk was still in - except how do you get the disc to eject?  I also initially assumed that the backup had somehow failed again and triggered a restart.  I tried to choose the option to just set up the machine without transferring data and when I got to the choose a name for your HOME folder message I tried to enter the same name I had it as before and it wouldn't allow me to do so, saying that that name was already in use.  I also tried a different name and that didn't work either - got the same message (I assume if it is not the same name that it won't sync up with the time machine data from the backup set).  So, I almost tried the "select time machine backup" option again until I looked at my HD space.  Clearly, there is space that has been used.  HD space was 997 at the start and now it's 636. My initial thought is to somehow get back into the setup area where I can use disc utility and erase the whole thing and then start over but 1) I don't think it's going to work even if I could get back there 2) I have no idea how to get this thing to reboot into that mode 3) I can't get the boot CD out to even try to restart to see if this thing did what it was supposed to, SO NOW I AM TOTALLY STUCK!  I have not called Apple Care back because quite frankly they were useless the first time.  I have a call into the repair guy but who knows how much help he will be.  In the mean time, I have a million things to do and a computer that isn't working - Whoever said Apples never have issues needs to be seriously censored!
    A few other notes:  I use Time Machine Editor to run my backups weekly.  It was set up that way from the get go by an Apple rep who came to my house to get us up and running.  Editor should not effect the way that time machine does its work, so I doubt there is relevance but thought it worth mentioning. 
    One other note is that the Apple Care agent tried to have me do something called a "Source" something or other from the disk utility screen but when she realized that my backup file (shown by date) contained many other sub files (11-27-12/MacintoshHD/MyNamesIMAC/etc.), it was not possible to run this operation - thus we aborted.  Sorry I don't remember the name of the process and unfortunately now can't access that option to go find it. 
    If you can help me, I would be eternally grateful!  I am open to having a phone conversation if you are willing to give me your email to mail you my number. I have so much work to do this week and this was the last thing I needed.  Did I mention this was supposed to be EASY?
    I used to be quite the geek with my PC - still on the learning curve with the mac but not enjoying it.  I am fairly tech savvy and I can follow instructions for a step by step solution if you've got one. 

    I got a recall and had the drive replaced. I have retored 3 timesa dn even had apple do the job and it is still not right. I still can't get a simple ghost of the data from time machineback tot he new drive. 
    This is Apple's explaination as taken from their web page.:
    Restoring your entire system from a backup
    If you are restoring a backup made by a Mac to the same Mac
    With your backup drive connected, start up your Mac from the Recovery system (Command-R at startup) or Mac OS X v10.6 installation disc. Then use the "Restore From Time Machine Backup" utility.
    Note: If "You can't restore   this backup because it was created by a different model of Mac" appears  when restoring  a backup that was  made on a different Mac, follow the onscreen instructions.
    I even posted this information on the community and apple removed it... because they don't like the:
    Off-topic or non-technical posts
    Non-constructive rants or complaints
    But here is my experieince:
    Take in 27iMac running 10.6.8, 5-7 days, what a joke, my boss will be happy to pay for a week without working. Finally get, "if you have TM back up, 3 days." Get machine back with 10.6.3, hit the R recovery, click TM back up, runs for 2 hours, reboots, looks great. Box up take back to office... update to install - OH NO, still running 10.6.3. Updates crash with no specific error on install, BUG PROBELM, nothing runs.
    Call Apple... after hours, tells me to boot using 10.6.2 disk, wipe, reinstall OS, udate to 10.6.8, THEN do the restore. GREAT! Only thing 10.6.2 DVD won't read... now back on phone... take back to the store, Genius says, he'll ix it just like it was. PROMISES it'll be fixed.
    Pick up next day, supposedly, booted to disk, wiped drive, reinstalled, updated to 10.6.8 and THEN did the RIGHT restore... Looks GREAT... apps run and 10.6.8 OS. Back to the office... NOT RUNNING right!!!... fonts messed up, drop box app needs new install, cocktail needs upgrade, Fetch not working, memorized paths gone... back ups locked out of permissions... ***!!
    4 hours on phone with apple and still no rsolution - to missing "settings". Seems there are THREE WAYS TO RESTORE (according to apply tech)... Running MIGRATE ASSISTANT and being able to choose your files, including settings, "R" RESTORE after they load a new OS... or NOW WAITING for them to send me a bootable 10.6.3 disk and then boot from disk, w/o installing OS and doing a restore from TM. I think this is done via the disk Utilties application.
    So now can't back up without doing a full 400 GB back up since permissons are screwed and possibly destroying any good back ups... can't work, like having hands tied behind back. WAITING for solution! Very upset!!!
    I did my first restore just like they said and now an 10 days without proper machine. Just FYI. I thnk I am going to make the store do the tech work so I have somthing to fall back on.

  • Can't restore from time machine after SSD upgrade

    Macbook Pro 13" mid-2009, 10.7.5 Lion
    I just swapped out my 160GB  HDD with a 250GB SSD on my MBP. When I booted up, I pressed Command-R to try to get into recovery mode but all it does was showing a gray folder with a question mark on it.
    I had previously backed up my HDD with time machine. My original HDD is no longer available because I tried to upgrade to Mavericks (since the command-R was not working) and upon restarting my MBP was locked with system pin code (that is another nightmare all by itself)
    What are my options besides getting a 10.7 Lion CD from the apple store and try to boot it up that way? and then restore from time machine?
    Any other way I can get into receovery mode?
    Thanks (My MBP is now a brick sitting on my desk)

    It's a bare drive so it isn't formatted and it doesn't yet have a Recovery HD installed on it.
    Your computer originally came with a version of Leopard installed. You can reinstall it if you still have the original discs that came with the computer. Or, if you have a retail Snow Leopard DVD you can reinstall Snow Leopard from which you can then upgrade to Mavericks (Lion is no longer available for re-download.) It's unlikely your local Apple Store has a Lion USB flash drive or DVD although you can certainly make an appointment and ask for their help.
    You should see if you can boot from the Recovery HD invisible image in your Time Machine backup drive. Connect it to the computer and use OPTION boot to get the boot manager. If you see a Recovery HD on your backup drive displayed, then boot from it.

Maybe you are looking for