Restore Snow Leopard From time Machine without an Optical drive

I have a couple of year old Macbook with a bad optical drive.
I want to pull the hard drive out of the Macbook and replace it with the original drive that came with the machine. The problem is that the original drive has OSX Leopard and I would like to get snow leopard on it. I have a good time machine backup that i could use, but i do not know how to restore the entire disk without using the OSX install DVD.
Is there anyway that i can do a time machine recovery without using the optical drive.
Thanks.

In order to restore Snow Leopard to that drive, it will need to be formatted using Disk Utility and I can't think of a way to do that without the optical drive unless you use a different Mac or an external optical drive.

Similar Messages

Cannot restore Snow Leopard from time machine from an earlier backup

I've been having a problem keeping my Mac Pro in sleep mode. I have tried disconnecting all USB's including those attached to the monitor. So I have decided to attempt to restore from a time machine backup from about 4 weeks ago to see if that resolves the problem. However at no point in the process am I offered a chance to choose which date to back up from. The restore process just assumes I want to restore from the latest backup.

Inserting the Snow Leopard install disk and launching from Finder. Then selecting 'Restart' which is what the user is told to do in the event of reinstalling from time machine. From that point the Mac restarts and installs SL but uses the latest time machine backup.

HT201250 Can I restore photo files from Time Machine without the use of an external drive? I'm trying to restore lost photo files and I see them listed in Time Machine (without use of an external drive), but when I try to restore I get a error code 36.

Can I restore photo files from Time Machine without the use of an external drive? While I was transferring photos back and forth from a thumb drive something went haywire and my IPhoto was wiped clean! When I click on Time Machine I see all the dated pages (without an external storage drive connected), go back to a date where all my photo files are there, click "restore", and I get the message: "The Finder can't complete the operation because some data in file cant be read or written (error code - 36)"

Thanks so much Terence. I tried some of the fixes from that page, but then discovered the suggestion to compress the Time Machine Back up of the original library and transfer it as a zip back to my computer as detailed here:
http://pondini.org/TM/E9.html
That worked like a charm. I really appreciate it.

How to revert to Snow Leopard from time machine on Yosemite Device.

Hello everybody,
Essentially I need to revert back to OS Snow leopard on my new macbook that has Yosemite installed (bought secondhand) as a few of my DJ programs (Rekordbox) are not co-operating with the new OS. I have the back up on a hard drive made with Time Machine, is there any way I can do this?
My old Macbook pro is still working, its just the backlight has gone out, so I have to use a torch on the back to see what I'm doing. Everything still functions correctly on my old device, and I can use the carbon clone copy if need be. Really just need my old laptop's os/files on this new device with Yosemite on it.
Thanks in advance.

Do a backup, preferably 2 seperate ones.
Revert to a Previous OS X
Revert to Snow Leopard
If you do revert, I'd use Setup Assistant to restore your data. This process takes a while, so do it when you won't need the computer for several hours, based on my experience.

Restoring backup files from Time Machine without system preference/Library files

Hi all. I recently ran into some trouble with my MBP and had the Apple store do a erase/install for me. At the time when I got my laptop back, I was told it would be best if I transferred my files including applications the drag and drop way to avoid restoring library/system files that could've been the cause of the problem in the first place. I'm currently still at the setup assistant stage and I'm really unsure of what to do to be honest because I'm under the impression that my application settings would pretty much be gone if I did the drag and drop method.
I read that setup assistant transfers only files that you want but I also read something from user Pondini that the Library files are automatically restored even if I unchecked everything. Which is problematic since that's what I want to avoid in the first place. If possible can anyone recommend a better option for my dilemma? I've read in one of the forum boards that dragging and dropping files can also cause some problems with how applications will work and I really don't want to have to deal with that after the trouble I'm going through with this. Is there a way to just restore Applications and the user folder (desktop, documents, downloads, etc) without including the library system files and folders through setup assistant?
Or do I really have to deal with dragging and dropping files instead? Would you recommend doing the stars wars method of Time Machine and picking only the files I want? Would that be most advisable?
Also, it would be really helpful if anyone can explain to me what the "other files and folders" mean exactly. Thanks very much!

Well what happened was my laptop ran into 2 kernel panics within 2 days (I posted a question here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/25605663#25605663). Which sent ME into a panic. I couldn't trust myself to go any further so I went to the Apple store who then helped did an erase/install for me because they suspect it could be a software issue (maybe it was missing codes or something) and suggested that it would be best for me to drag/drop restore my stuff manually. I'm not very keen on a full system restore either because I know there are some system files which I'd rather not have sticking around (like com.rims which are super stubborn to get rid of) and which could even have been the source of my trouble right now.
I was reading through every single page of Pondini's articles and I'm couldn't find anything which said I could just restore the apps in my apps folder without transferring anything else (ie. the library folder in the macintosh hd folder) since i'm assuming anything from the library folder of the user would be obsolete if I choose not to restore those files using setup assistant. But I'm more reluctant about not using setup assistant for restoring my apps because I don't know how bad it will turn out. Not to mention I won't know if they would restore system root files that should've been long gone since I uninstalled them.

How do I restore iCloud mailboxes from Time Machine without losing new mail?

This morning when I opened my laptop and checked my email, Apple Mail decided to flag every single email in my three separate Apple-related accounts ([email protected],[email protected], and [email protected])—some 14,500+ emails total. None of the emails in my comcast or yahoo accounts were affected. Of course, each of the three accounts is set to download copies to my laptop as well as keep them on the server, so now all of those emails are flagged across the board—on my iMac, my iPhone, my iPad mini as well as my laptop. Yay. Since some of the emails were actually flagged intentionally by me over time, I don't want to just unflag everything or I'll lose my flags as well as the ones spontaneously generated this morning.
My questions are:
1) If I use a Time Machine backup from last night to restore the three affected mailboxes, will iCloud accept them as the de facto most up-to-date versions, or do I still have to go through some complicated process in order to convince the cloud that the 14,500+ unflagged emails don't then need to be "updated" to flagged status?
2) More importantly, will the cloud still sync properly so that I still get all of the emails that came since last night? I'm fine if the absence of the more recent emails from the "new" (actually older TM) mailboxes is interpreted as though they've been deleted, since my preferences are set to keep deleted email on the server for a month. But it would be a problem if those emails simply disappear into the ether.
3) Does anyone have any idea what might have caused the random flagging in the first place and/or suggestions for keeping it from happening in the future?
I remember vaguely that in the early days of Time Machine, restoring iCloud mailboxes was a complicated process in order to trick the cloud into accepting the Time Machine backup as the latest and greatest version. I take it that's no longer such a tricky proposition nowadays, since a search of Apple's knowledge base yielded little information on it. I'd appreciate some confirmation on that, however, so I know what to expect after the restore.
Thanks!
I'm going to try cross-posting this issue in both the iCloud and Time Machine forums since it's some of both. Apologies in advance if that causes confusion.

I set up an admin account for myself, logged on to it, and then followed the procedure in the help file to delete his account, saving it as a .dmg file. Then, when he asked for his old emails, I followed the procedure in the help file to restore a deleted user account and copied the contents of the .dmg into it.
I'm not entirely confident I got the restoration sequence right, since I find the order of steps in the help file confusing. But everything except the Mail data seems to be recovered.
Another source of trouble may be the email account settings: when I opened Mail under his log-on, there were no accounts set up: I recreated them using his email address and password, but Mail may well be treating these as new accounts, rather than re-opened old accounts.
Thanks, John

How can i partition my hard drive with lion on it and install snow leopard from time machine

How do I partition my hard drive which has lion on it and reinstall os6 from my time machine?

You going to need a second harddrive. It is riskie to resize your haddrive with live data on it. You need a backup of the data. That said, you might as well copy your data to the second harddrive. Repartition. Then copy the data back. I bought a 128gig flash drive from walmart for $32.
There were repartition commands introduced in 10.4.6 to repartition the harddrive.
For what it is worth, you can non-destructively partition a harddrive from single user mode in 10.4.6 or greater. Of course, you should have a backup of the harddrive.
http://www.ffnn.nl/pages/articles/apple-mac-os-x/nondestructive-partitioning.php

Restore iTunes library from Time Machine, after full hard drive wipe

I had to do a full hard drive wipe on my MBP running 10.6.6, so I made a full Time Machine backup before hand. I reinstalled os x (10.6.3) and used migration assistant to restore my files from the Time Machine backup.
Most of this process has been painless, however, when I open iTunes it's empty. I have all the music files, iTunes Library.itdb, iTunes Library Extras.itdb and iTunes Library Genius.itdb. Is there a way to restore my previous iTunes library with these files? I feel like this should be a pretty basic thing to do but I haven't found much/any documentation of it online. Any help would be much appreciated.

Take the files that you list and the iTunes music folder from the TM b/u and drag them to the iTunes folder. To put it in simpler terms - drag the iTunes folder from the TM to the same location on the internal HD.
By default the path should be HD>User>Your Account>Music>iTunes(your iTunes files are here)>iTunes Music (your music files are here)
MJ

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!

Restored my iMac from Time Machine now Hard Drive has doubled! Need Space!

I Restored my new (refurbished) iMac 2010 (Snow Leopard 10.6.4) from Time Machine now the Hard Drive has doubled 450GB to 900GB. I want to recover the space on my hard drive, What do I do?
Side Note: My previous iMac (2007) died so I went and bought a refurbished model here. My old iMac had 10.6.8 installed versus my "new" iMac has 10.6.4 installed. I can't restore from my Time Machine since it was from another model.

Since it's a new (refurb), boot with the install disc, wipe the HD, and reinstall the OS. On first boot, don't migrate, but create an admin account using the same username/password combo as on the TM backup. When finished, run Software Update, and bring it up to 10.6.8. Then, mount the TM HD and try restoring. Life would be so much easier if you had a bootable backup/clone. Instantly able to migrate.
For more on TM, see Pondini's TM FAQs.

After full restore from Time machine, my TM hard drive won;t mount

I got my macbook pro back from a logic board repair and restored it fully from Time Machine using my leopard install disc.
Took a while, but it has installed OK. But some applications weren't restored and now the Time Machine drive won't mount on the Macbook at all. When I open up time machine - and try to choose a backup disc nothing comes up.
The drive shows up on a PC when i connect it (but won;t read it as its mac formatted) so I'm pretty sure there;s nothing wrong with the drive.

Also, be aware that TM thinks you got a new Mac, not a new logic board. Thus you won't see your TM backups in the normal way. You'll need the (badly named) +*Browse Other Time Machine Disks+* option (see #E2 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum).
In addition, when you start doing new backups, TM will start a whole new "sequence," as if it were a different Mac. See #C8 in the Troubleshooting Tip for options.

Empty iTunes, then Restore Some Playlists from Time Machine?

My MacBook Pro is full, mainly because of the massive collection of music. Everything is backed up on Time Machine. I want to reduce my iTunes library by about 50% to regain some capacity. Can I delete my entire iTunes library off the MacBook, then reinstall only the playlists that I want from Time Machine? What's the best/safest way to do this?

+I just restored my MBP from Time Machine, everything went fine. But I feel my MBR start up much slower than before. So now I want to do a clean install Leopard.+
Wait on the erase and install. Launch Disk Utility which is in the Applications > Utilities folder and Verify your disk and repair permissions. If Verify shows any errors boot from the Leopard install DVD by holding the "c" key down until the spinning gear appears. Pick a language and choose Utilities > Disk and run Repair until no errors appear. Repair permissions.
If that doesn't work try resetting the PRAM which quite often fixes slow boot times.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
+Would like to ask you guys who experiences in Time Machine that after installing Leopard, I want to restore some applications from Time Machine such as MS office, Wow, Photoshop...Will they fully function if I restore from TM?+
I don't know about Wow but Photoshop and MS Office install too many files in too many places for it to be practical to restore them from Time Machine backups after doing an erase and install. You need to reinstall those from the original disks for those applications.

Restore some application from time machine problem.

Hi Everybody,
I just restored my MBP from Time Machine, everything went fine. But I feel my MBR start up much slower than before. So now I want to do a clean install Leopard.
I would like to ask you guys who experiences in Time Machine that after installing Leopard, I want to restore some applications from Time Machine such as MS office, Wow, Photoshop...Will they fully function if I restore from TM?
I acknowledge that some applications are like packages so after installing in Mac OS, they are actually located in different places in the system. Whereas others is like small application so we just copy and use. So if big applications as packages, I can not just copy from TM and put it in my new Leopard to use, can't I? If I can't, so is there any ways I can copy it back and use?
I am so confusing about this and I hope very much that somebody could help me out this problem, I would greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

+I just restored my MBP from Time Machine, everything went fine. But I feel my MBR start up much slower than before. So now I want to do a clean install Leopard.+
Wait on the erase and install. Launch Disk Utility which is in the Applications > Utilities folder and Verify your disk and repair permissions. If Verify shows any errors boot from the Leopard install DVD by holding the "c" key down until the spinning gear appears. Pick a language and choose Utilities > Disk and run Repair until no errors appear. Repair permissions.
If that doesn't work try resetting the PRAM which quite often fixes slow boot times.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
+Would like to ask you guys who experiences in Time Machine that after installing Leopard, I want to restore some applications from Time Machine such as MS office, Wow, Photoshop...Will they fully function if I restore from TM?+
I don't know about Wow but Photoshop and MS Office install too many files in too many places for it to be practical to restore them from Time Machine backups after doing an erase and install. You need to reinstall those from the original disks for those applications.

How to delete a file from time machine without entering time machine mode ?

Is there a terminial hack or a third-party app to delete a backed up file from the finder and at the same time from time machine without having to enter time machine mode, and is there a shortcut to do so ?

Please post your code using code tags (click on CODE above the text area, when posting)
response.setContentType("application/octet-stream");Why octet-stream? Set the correct mime-type.
String disHeader = "Attachment; Filename=\"filename\"";The filename should just be the file's name. Not the complete path to the file! This will tell anyone where the file is located on the server. It's also inconvenient because by default,the browser will suggest it as the name for the download.
Your way of writing to the output stream is just plain wrong. See this snippet (picked from [http://balusc.blogspot.com/2007/07/fileservlet.html])
        BufferedInputStream input = null;
        BufferedOutputStream output = null;
        try {
            // Open streams.
            input = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(file), DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE);
            output = new BufferedOutputStream(response.getOutputStream(), DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE);
            // Write file contents to response.
            byte[] buffer = new byte[DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE];
            int length;
            while ((length = input.read(buffer)) > 0) {
                output.write(buffer, 0, length);
            // Finalize task.
            output.flush();
        } finally {
            // Gently close streams.
            close(output);
            close(input);
        }

How to restore iTunes Library from Time Machine on Mavericks?

Please, can someone give me the instructions on how to restore iTunes Library from Time Machine on Mavericks?

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for details.

Restore Snow Leopard From time Machine without an Optical drive

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