Booting from TM disk restore to a clean HDD

[Platform]

Hi

My hard drive recentl crashed/failed (well what i suspect) on my 2008 unibody macbook, I purchased a new SSD drive (Crucial MX300, was listed as compatible on crucial website) and have now installed it and hoping to restore a time machine backup to this new drive.

However, following power on and holding down the option key I get and image to select time machine (see attached image) which seems good, however after selecting it i get the "question mark folder" (see attached image) displaying, same as if I didn't do anything during the boot process.

My questions is, what am Indoring wrong?

thanks

 

[JohnDS]

You don't say what OS you were using. Your TimeMachine backup won't be bootable unless it was created with OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or newer. What OS were you using?
[doublepost=1478026795][/doublepost]Also, I believe your computer is too old to use internet recovery.

If you have another working Mac you might be able to use it to install an operating system on the faulty Mac using target disk mode.

 

[CoastalOR]

Bootable Time Machine backups that contained OS 10.7 - 10.10 were bootable because they contained the Recovery partition. That capability stopped with OS 10.11 for some reason.

 

[Platform]

Bootable Time Machine backups that contained OS 10.7 - 10.10 were bootable because they contained the Recovery partition. That capability stopped with OS 10.11 for some reason.

Fogot to mention, ran 10.11, so that's what I have on my time machine backups, and yeah the machine isn't compatible with internet recovery.

But why stop this feature...hmmm...okay thanks

Well i guess i'll have to use another mac then to create a bootable usb drive or?

 

[Bruno09]

With OS 10.11 the Time Machine backup still contains the recovery partition, but lazy engineers forgot to change the word "kernelcache" for "prelinkedkernel" in the com.apple.Boot.plist file. (*)

Which is ununderstandable.

Problem solved with Sierra.

(*) I have edited this file in order to make my 10.11 TM backup bootable.

 

[CoastalOR]

If using another Mac does not work out, then bootable El Capitan USB flash drive installers are available from Amazon and eBay. Having a cloned bootable external drive or a bootable El Capitan USB flash drive installer would be good to have in your situation for the future.