Made a mess of my clean install

Question

OKay, I took a copy of my lion install onto dvd.  I clicked reinstall which worked fine, however I wanted a clean install of lion on my machine as I have issues with too much content too little hardrive space.
So my thinking was clean install and then only place back on there what I need once I have cleaned it and removed anything I dont want....so I took a clone backup and also a timemanchine backup
Here is when it went wrong.
I clicked the disk utlity, and erased the contents of the hardrive.  I then stupidly read the how to incorrectly and moved the disk drive to the hardrive, thinking this would then  restore from the disk, but all it has done is made the drive locked and i'm no longer able to restore, erase or boot from the disk or the hardrive.
Next major mistake, I selected restore from timemachine, so its now overwritten my clone copy with the disk copy.
I'm in  a right mess now and I dont know how to get out of it, any ideas?

Answer 1

CornwallAppleMac wrote:
 I created the boot disk after I had downloaded from the app store, I did not upgrade immediately, so placed a copy of the contents of the upgrade and copied this to a dvd
Ok, I see what you did. You just saved the downloaded Lion Installer, you didn't create a bootable Lion DVD as outlined in this procedure.
http://eggfreckles.net/notes/burning-a-lion-boot-disc/
If you have another Mac #2 and good single layer DVD's, go ahead and copy that Lion Installer to the hard drive of Mac #2 and create the bootable Lion DVD as outlined in the link instructions.
Your going to need this to boot from and install both the Lion Recovery Partition and the Lion OS X Partition again.
I had one hardrive, with two partitions, one with the timemachine backup and the other partition with clone.
Ok, the clone partiton got TM-ed, but you still got a TM to restore from, which is what we are going to focus on now and then make another clone later to do the "cleanup" operation you initially wanted to do.
I booted from the dvd and went into disk utility where I erased the hardrive.
How did you boot from this DVD? Did you hold c and boot, or option or??
Was this Lion DVD created as outlined in the Eggfreckles link?
once this was compelted it rebooted and I went back to the disk utility, however I moved the DVD contents across to the internal hardrive.....I know I should have gone to reinstall on the lion install from the DVD now.
Yes, but you can boot off the DVD again and erase and install Lion from the DVD like you should have, once you do that just restore from TM.
Clicked restore and it seems to have restored the copy of the dvd to my hardrive.
It will restore a copy of the DVD installer, not the actual install of Lion and the Lion Recovery Partition
But you realize your mistake now.
I then connected my hardrive with the time machine and clone partitions, it asked me select a backup source, so I clicked on timemachine.  It asked me to click on the drive to restore to, I thought it has selected my internal drive but it has selected my partition with the clone on it and wiped it.
That's ok, you WISELY made two backups, although on the same drive which wasn't the best choice as if that hard drive died it would take both TM and the clone down.
So since you have a Lion/Lion Recovery install DVD and a TM to restore from, all you have to do is those in that order and your back to normal.
Once your back to normal on your boot drive, THEN clone over the Lion Partition to the clone partiton again (actually you should use another drive)
That should get you back exactly where you were before you started.
So now I have a timemachine folder with backups on, which I have just copied onto another drive just in case I mess up again using another mac I have. 
However when i go back to my Imac, it says select the boot up disk and takes me to the lion restore options, if I click restore lion it takes me to what was my internal drive but says it is locked.  this disk is locked.  which is now called MAC OS X install ESD.
I have a cd with my lion on it, and a hardrive.  If I click boot to dvd it says cannot find files, if I boot to hardrive it takes me to the lion install screen but wont go any further.
Ok, what your doing is moving/copying stuff around and running things without knowing what is what and what they do.
You likely need to STOP and educate yourself first.
You have a Lion boot DVD and you have a TM restore, that will get you back to before all this started, but the way your going your going to delete something or mess up TM.
If you can't c boot off the Lion DVD and erase and format the drive, install Lion and reboot, connect the TM drive and restore from that, then you need to stop and take it to someone who can.
Your working with your last backup, you mess up now and all your files will be gone.