Hi everyone. I ran into problems while trying to restore my system from a back up I created on my external hard drive when I had Snow leopard installed. My hard drive died and I got a new one. Put it in. I could not find the CD with Snow Leopard I bought so I installed 10.4 from the CD that originally came with my Mac. However I have my external drive that I used to back up my system when it was working through Time Machine. I connected this drive and tried to restore using disk utility but got an error saying "Unable to access device. Make sure the device is connected and try again". The device is my external drive that IS connected. However disk utility has problems with it. I also tried to view my backed files on it and could not do that as I was getting an error message. What could be the problem? I would greatly appreciate any help. Thank you.
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Cannot restore to Mac OS 10.4 from 10.5 backup
- Thread starter margo2475
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You could insert your System Disk once again and format the drive using Disk Utility from the disk. Then follow These Instructions.
I am a little confused about your OS on the backup. You wrote 10.5 in your thread title which is Leopard but you mention that the backup and your lost disk is Snow Leopard which is 10.6.
Anyway, hope this helps -GDF
I am a little confused about your OS on the backup. You wrote 10.5 in your thread title which is Leopard but you mention that the backup and your lost disk is Snow Leopard which is 10.6.
Anyway, hope this helps -GDF
Before 10.5 there was no time machine. If you do not have your 10.5 or 10.6 disc, you won't be able to do a time machine backup restore.
10.6 is $30, seems worth it to me if you've lost your original disc and all your data.
10.6 is $30, seems worth it to me if you've lost your original disc and all your data.
Exactly. This Mac originally came with 10.4. I put 10.6 on it (never mind the 10.5 in the title, I got confused) and used external hard drive to create several backups with Time Machine. The my internal drive died. I got a new one, formatted it and had to put 10.4 back because I could not find disk with 10.6. Now I have Mac with 10.4 and backup drive with 10.6. I cannot use Time Machine to restore, so I have to use disk utility I guess. I will do what the previous blogger suggested and see if it works.
Those are 10.5 instructions. I hope that works for you, but I don't think it will. The ability to restore from a time machine backup, with the restore disc, is written on the disc. I am pretty sure you'll need a 10.5 or 10.6 disc to do this. ESPECIALLY if you're currently running 10.4.
I apologize for the instructions posted above. I've never done a Time Machine restore. I prefer using a cloned backup restore method.
Instead of or in addition to a Time Machine backup, you can make a clone backup of your entire hard drive that is an exact duplication. I use SuperDuper for this. The benefit is if ever your startup disk crashes or if you replace it, you can copy the clone backup to the newly installed formatted drive. Another advantage is you can boot your system from your clone backup.
well.. heh.. it is a bit too late to create a clone now. I will keep this in mind for the future though. Thank you! In the meanwhile what should I do to be able to recover my data stored on that backup drive? Is my only option to find or buy another copy of 10.6, do a clean install and then I will be able to see data on my backup drive and even restore from it?
Buy the Snow Leopard retail copy (only $29us) and the follow the instructs that I posted above. The flaw that I had was that your only system disk was 10.4 Tiger which was pre-Time Machine.