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General discussion

Unable to restore Time Machine drive using Disk Utility

by markw10 Mar 4, 2011 5:46PM PST

I had a drive fail recently and it was the 2nd hard drive in my system that was only for data. It was not the primary system drive. I have a 3rd hard drive in the system which is a Time Machine Backup drive and Time Machine backs up both of my first two hard drives.
I just got the hard drive replaced so have installed it in my system and formatted the drive with the same name as the original drive that failed.
Here is my problem:
I earlier posted about how to best do a restore and the main suggestion was to go into Disk Utility, click on the new drive that replaced the crashed drive, click the Reestore tab, and then go to destination and select the destination which I put as the drive that had failed but is now replaced, I then click on Image in the Source section and select my Time Machine drive, my backups file, and go to the most recent backup that contained this drive that failed. Yet I can select it or any of the files on the hard drive but the open option is greyed out on this screen. The cancel button is the only active button.
Is there something I am doing wrong? Is there another way to restore this drive?
Thank you for your help.

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The Disk Utility method only works

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Mar 4, 2011 9:58PM PST

if you actually made a backup of the disk by using Disk Utility.
Quote from Apple:
This alternative backup process will produce a disk image of your entire Mac OS X disk's contents. This process preserves the unique attributes of your files, such as permissions, ACLs and UUIDs. A disk image backup is good for an archive-type backup for offsite storage.
UnQuote
Unless you did that procedure before replacing the drive, you will have no success in restoring the drive as there is no Image for DU to use as the Restore media.

Using Time Machine, you "should" be able to do the following:
Double click the new drive to open it.
Once its window is open, launch Time Machine from the icon in the dock. You "should" see the desktop of the failed drive. Select all and Restore.

P

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