[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Mac experts (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 8/22/2014 1:41:30 PM EDT
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I have an early 2011 MacBook Pro. I wanted to upgrade it so I installed extra ram and an ssd. I started up using HD recovery and used Disk Utility to format the new ssd. Then I used Time Machine to restore everything. When I start up I get to the Apple logo, then the computer shuts down. Evidently the Time Machine restore gave me a corrupt OS. I bought the ram and ssd from OWC, and they suggest using HD recovery to install Lion, then go to the app store and reinstall Mavericks, then use Time Machine to restore the ssd... Sound like the best option?
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I'm not an expert, but I've been using Macs for a long time. I'm pretty sure Time Machine can only restore when you have an OS installed on the disk. It's not a ghost image of your hard drive.
So, install OS first, then you can recover your data from Time Machine. |
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You should give Time Machine one more try then try what OWC suggested.
I like clean installs personally and would install Lion, Mavericks, Then just copy files from Time Machine not a full restore. ETA: as said above ram could be bad. Try this: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509 |
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Quoted: If you don't have a mavericks install image, then that'd be the way you'd have to do it. Quoted: Quoted: they suggest using HD recovery to install Lion, then go to the app store and reinstall Mavericks, then use Time Machine to restore the ssd... If you don't have a mavericks install image, then that'd be the way you'd have to do it. So just so I understand... When Time Machine did a full restore, it did not install the OS along with all the other data, correct?
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Quoted: I'm not an expert, but I've been using Macs for a long time. I'm pretty sure Time Machine can only restore when you have an OS installed on the disk. It's not a ghost image of your hard drive. So, install OS first, then you can recover your data from Time Machine. Time Machine did the full restore. It took about 2 hrs via ethernet cable. Showed the progress bar as it restored.
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Quoted:
So just so I understand... When Time Machine did a full restore, it did not install the OS along with all the other data, correct? Quoted:
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they suggest using HD recovery to install Lion, then go to the app store and reinstall Mavericks, then use Time Machine to restore the ssd... If you don't have a mavericks install image, then that'd be the way you'd have to do it. So just so I understand... When Time Machine did a full restore, it did not install the OS along with all the other data, correct? That's my understanding. I could be wrong, but when I installed a new SSD in my Macbook Pro, the guy at the Apple store told me I'd have to install a fresh copy of the OS before I could restore it. |
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Quoted: That's my understanding. I could be wrong, but when I installed a new SSD in my Macbook Pro, the guy at the Apple store told me I'd have to install a fresh copy of the OS before I could restore it. Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: they suggest using HD recovery to install Lion, then go to the app store and reinstall Mavericks, then use Time Machine to restore the ssd... If you don't have a mavericks install image, then that'd be the way you'd have to do it. So just so I understand... When Time Machine did a full restore, it did not install the OS along with all the other data, correct? That's my understanding. I could be wrong, but when I installed a new SSD in my Macbook Pro, the guy at the Apple store told me I'd have to install a fresh copy of the OS before I could restore it. It sure would have been nice if Time Machine stopped me when I did the restore and said, "You need to install OS before attempting this restore." Instead, it let me take two hours to restore data that I can't use. |
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If you can attach the SSD to your MBP somehow, you can use Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate the existing drive to the SSD.
My method when I did it was to use another MBP as a firewire enclosure. Stick the SSD in the second MBP, start it holding "T", attach that machine to yours with a firewire cable, then clone from the old to the new drive. |
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Quoted: Whoa. Gotta check that out. I just formatted the ssd so my Time Machine would see it. Quoted: Quoted: It sounds as if you restored from Time Machine without first creating the OSX recovery partition on the new SSD. Is that correct? Whoa. Gotta check that out. I just formatted the ssd so my Time Machine would see it. Check it out. I suspect it's missing. Despite some of the comments in the thread, Time Machine does restore the complete system files and OS, but it is not a block level drive cloning tool. I believe all of your data is on the new drive and intact, but the drive is missing the partition information that tells the computer where and how to start the system. One of the things that happens when you install the OS onto a bare drive is that the installer creates the recovery partition and boot information. That's one of the primary reasons Apple recommends installing the OS first and then doing a Time Machine restore. Technically you don't have to, but it makes things far easier for the average user. |
I recently updated my 2011 MBP to an SSD as well. Here's how I did it.
After that everything was great. Time Machine never even skipped a beat and didn't realize there was even a new drive installed. Backups are running normally. |
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Does superduper clone the bootcamp directory also? Id like to put a bigger drive in my macbook also ,but I'd like to be sure i can recover and increase the size of the bootcamp partition. Hoping i dont have to reinstall all the software. I don't have a Boot Camp partition so it never came up during my upgrade. When I need Windows I use VMware Fusion. However, doing a quick Google search seems to indicate that it may not work in your situation. |
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First thing I said when I contacted OWC was, "Did I get some bad ram?" Quoted:
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You might have gotten some bad RAM. I would pull it and reinstall your original stuff, see if it boots then. First thing I said when I contacted OWC was, "Did I get some bad ram?" There's really no way to know without testing via the Apple tool listed above. I'd be curious to see the results. |
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Now the bad news... Lion worked great, as reported. Ram must be okay... ssd must be okay... Then I went to the app store and installed Mavericks... Then I did a restore from Time Machine... And computer shuts down right after the apple logo comes on the screen. What now? Restore an earlier backup? Or if one is corrupt are they all corrupt? |
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And it's a long shot, but you can also try just starting up holding down option. That'll list your available boot devices and let you select from them. Select the hard drive (if it shows up). If that does it, make sure the HD is selected as the boot device in system prefs and you're good to go. If the drive doesn't show up as an available boot device, that's an inconclusive but valuable data point also.
ETA- I don't use Mavericks at work though, so if this is an issue specific to that version of OS, I'm mostly useless. 
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Quoted: Try booting into safe mode... hold down shift key right after you hear the startup chime and tell us where its hanging up. You'll see a black screen with info scrolling down on it as the machine boots. Booted into safe mode as instructed. Apple logo appears... the loading "wheel" spins, and the horizontal loading status bar starts to fill from left to right... It gets about one-third full - then computer shuts down.
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Quoted: And it's a long shot, but you can also try just starting up holding down option. That'll list your available boot devices and let you select from them. Select the hard drive (if it shows up). If that does it, make sure the HD is selected as the boot device in system prefs and you're good to go. If the drive doesn't show up as an available boot device, that's an inconclusive but valuable data point also. ETA- I don't use Mavericks at work though, so if this is an issue specific to that version of OS, I'm mostly useless. |
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Well, my old HD is intact. (BTW, I put the old ram in, and same problem occurs) So, if I reinstall the old HD, where should I go from there? Is there any way that it will mess up my HD if I put it back in my Mac? I also have an external ssd that I could use... Should I use my wife's MBP and create a bootable disk from hers? |
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Quoted: Well maybe things have changed but I've done time machine restores on bare drives before and ended up with a working machine. I think I did about a half dozen machines. What good would time machine be if it wouldn't let you do a full restore? It did a full restore... just doesn't work About a month ago I used my TM to do a restore after I upgraded to Mavericks. No issues then. |
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Quoted:
Well, my old HD is intact. (BTW, I put the old ram in, and same problem occurs) So, if I reinstall the old HD, where should I go from there? Is there any way that it will mess up my HD if I put it back in my Mac? I also have an external ssd that I could use... Should I use my wife's MBP and create a bootable disk from hers? Ok, another "out in left field" option, and not a quick one  … Reinstall Mavericks fresh to the SSD. Plug your old HD into your wife's MBP. If you have a firewire, start the second MBP up as a target drive (holding T), connect the two computers, and use Migration Assistant to move your account over.
Alternately if no firewire, start your wife's MBP up on your old HD. Start migration assistant on both machines with the appropriate "From" and "To" options and do it over the network. That'll take even longer though. The Firewire will speed it up a fair bit. I'm guessing something's fouled up with the time machine backup. You have a working copy of the data you want on the old HD though, and Migration Assistant usually does a pretty good job. |
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Quoted: Ok, another "out in left field" option, and not a quick one … Reinstall Mavericks fresh to the SSD. Plug your old HD into your wife's MBP. If you have a firewire, start the second MBP up as a target drive (holding T), connect the two computers, and use Migration Assistant to move your account over.Alternately if no firewire, start your wife's MBP up on your old HD. Start migration assistant on both machines with the appropriate "From" and "To" options and do it over the network. That'll take even longer though. The Firewire will speed it up a fair bit. I'm guessing something's fouled up with the time machine backup. You have a working copy of the data you want on the old HD though, and Migration Assistant usually does a pretty good job. Quoted: Quoted: Well, my old HD is intact. (BTW, I put the old ram in, and same problem occurs) So, if I reinstall the old HD, where should I go from there? Is there any way that it will mess up my HD if I put it back in my Mac? I also have an external ssd that I could use... Should I use my wife's MBP and create a bootable disk from hers? Ok, another "out in left field" option, and not a quick one … Reinstall Mavericks fresh to the SSD. Plug your old HD into your wife's MBP. If you have a firewire, start the second MBP up as a target drive (holding T), connect the two computers, and use Migration Assistant to move your account over.Alternately if no firewire, start your wife's MBP up on your old HD. Start migration assistant on both machines with the appropriate "From" and "To" options and do it over the network. That'll take even longer though. The Firewire will speed it up a fair bit. I'm guessing something's fouled up with the time machine backup. You have a working copy of the data you want on the old HD though, and Migration Assistant usually does a pretty good job. What if I select an earlier date from Time Machine and try to restore from that? Make any sense? Losing confidence in my Time Machine...
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Quoted:
What if I select an earlier date from Time Machine and try to restore from that? Make any sense? Losing confidence in my Time Machine... Quoted:
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Well, my old HD is intact. (BTW, I put the old ram in, and same problem occurs) So, if I reinstall the old HD, where should I go from there? Is there any way that it will mess up my HD if I put it back in my Mac? I also have an external ssd that I could use... Should I use my wife's MBP and create a bootable disk from hers? Ok, another "out in left field" option, and not a quick one … Reinstall Mavericks fresh to the SSD. Plug your old HD into your wife's MBP. If you have a firewire, start the second MBP up as a target drive (holding T), connect the two computers, and use Migration Assistant to move your account over.
Alternately if no firewire, start your wife's MBP up on your old HD. Start migration assistant on both machines with the appropriate "From" and "To" options and do it over the network. That'll take even longer though. The Firewire will speed it up a fair bit. I'm guessing something's fouled up with the time machine backup. You have a working copy of the data you want on the old HD though, and Migration Assistant usually does a pretty good job. What if I select an earlier date from Time Machine and try to restore from that? Make any sense? Losing confidence in my Time Machine... It *might* help, but you're losing whatever changes happened between it and current. I personally have more confidence in Migration Assistant, but I also use it a LOT more. |
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I have an early 2011 MacBook Pro. I wanted to upgrade it so I installed extra ram and an ssd. I started up using HD recovery and used Disk Utility to format the new ssd. Then I used Time Machine to restore everything. When I start up I get to the Apple logo, then the computer shuts down. Evidently the Time Machine restore gave me a corrupt OS. I bought the ram and ssd from OWC, and they suggest using HD recovery to install Lion, then go to the app store and reinstall Mavericks, then use Time Machine to restore the ssd... Sound like the best option? Take the ssd and plug it into a sub cable adaptor put your old hard disk into the system and boot to the old hard dusk. Plug in the usb ssd format with disk utility and then download carbon copy cloner. Use that to clone the old hard disk to the new ssd. |
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Well, I perhaps I am a little insane according to the definition... Before I do anything else (since my Mac won't allow me to install an OS from HD recovery) I am trying another complete restoration from Time Machine using the same date... and I am hoping for a different result. ETA: ... and, the same result. No joy. |
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Quoted: stop by the apple store, or look up how to install Maverick straight over the night Yesterday, HD recovery allowed me to install Lion (via internet). Computer worked great. SSD and ram made it sing. Then I went to app store and installed Mavericks. No problem. Then I went to Time Machine and did a restore. Then my MBP would shut down seconds after starting up. Went back to HD recovery, and Lion install was no longer an option - Mavericks was the only option, and it kept trying to install and would say there was a problem and to try it again. And it would just repeat that. I just got through another attempt at a TM restore using the same date and time and had the same bad result. Now I am attempting a TM restore from one hour earlier, and hope that one works. I know I have other options since my original HD is intact, but I want to find out what's up with this Time Machine. If I can't restore from it, what good is it?
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Yesterday, HD recovery allowed me to install Lion (via internet). Computer worked great. SSD and ram made it sing. Then I went to app store and installed Mavericks. No problem. Then I went to Time Machine and did a restore. Then my MBP would shut down seconds after starting up. Went back to HD recovery, and Lion install was no longer an option - Mavericks was the only option, and it kept trying to install and would say there was a problem and to try it again. And it would just repeat that. I just got through another attempt at a TM restore using the same date and time and had the same bad result. Now I am attempting a TM restore from one hour earlier, and hope that one works. I know I have other options since my original HD is intact, but I want to find out what's up with this Time Machine. If I can't restore from it, what good is it? Quoted:
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stop by the apple store, or look up how to install Maverick straight over the night Yesterday, HD recovery allowed me to install Lion (via internet). Computer worked great. SSD and ram made it sing. Then I went to app store and installed Mavericks. No problem. Then I went to Time Machine and did a restore. Then my MBP would shut down seconds after starting up. Went back to HD recovery, and Lion install was no longer an option - Mavericks was the only option, and it kept trying to install and would say there was a problem and to try it again. And it would just repeat that. I just got through another attempt at a TM restore using the same date and time and had the same bad result. Now I am attempting a TM restore from one hour earlier, and hope that one works. I know I have other options since my original HD is intact, but I want to find out what's up with this Time Machine. If I can't restore from it, what good is it? Well, here's the thing… Time Machine is what they call an incremental backup. It takes one full copy initially, then just copies over what changes as time goes on. So let's presume there's something borked up about the backup… The only difference between the two backups you used is the files that changed in that last hour. The odds of those files being what's at fault here are pretty slim. You might horse around and try far older iterations of your time machine backup if that were your only option for recovering your data but it isn't. You have a known good, current bootable copy of your setup on the old drive. There's a ton of ways to get your stuff back over. You could do it manually by copying your user folder off the old drive onto a fresh install, then adding a user with that name. "There is already a user folder with that name, do you wish to use it?" or something like that. Then manually reinstall your applications. If you don't have a ton of apps and you can easily find the installers, that's usually a pretty easy, pretty uncomplicated way of doing it. I prefer Migration Assistant though, because it moves apps and pretty much everything that isn't a bone stock install over fairly seamlessly, and because it can be done using a wide variety of methods to connect the two machines. You can even use MA with a time machine backup, but I'd call yours broke and start over when this HD issue is resolved. Time Machine does work most of the time. Sometimes it, like any backup program, goes all kerflooey though. Backups are traditionally a real pain in the ass to do right.
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Why are you trying to restore from time machine in Mavericks? If you install Lion, do the upgrade to mavericks you should not lose anything. Then reformat your time machine disk and re-backup everything from mavericks.
Eta at this point you should start over. Reformat your ssd, install Lion, import from time machine, upgrade to mavericks and then you're done. You can then reformat the TM disk and re-backup from mavericks. You should be set then. |
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Why are you trying to restore from time machine in Mavericks? If you install Lion, do the upgrade to mavericks you should not lose anything. Then reformat your time machine disk and re-backup everything from mavericks. Eta at this point you should start over. Reformat your ssd, install Lion, import from time machine, upgrade to mavericks and then you're done. You can then reformat the TM disk and re-backup from mavericks. You should be set then. Yup. Lion appears to work for you. Get it working again and migrate your data from your old drive. Then once it's working for you, I'd make a disk image for a backup and then backup to the Time Machine. THEN I'd update or do a clean install to Mavericks. |
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Try zapping your PRAM. Instructions here: |
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Quoted: Why are you trying to restore from time machine in Mavericks? If you install Lion, do the upgrade to mavericks you should not lose anything. Then reformat your time machine disk and re-backup everything from mavericks. Eta at this point you should start over. Reformat your ssd, install Lion, import from time machine, upgrade to mavericks and then you're done. You can then reformat the TM disk and re-backup from mavericks. You should be set then. this
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