disk utility help

[bc008]

i had a time machine drive, and i screwed it all up.

i tried to partition it for boot camp and that didnt work, so i tried to restore it. that didnt work and now its all screwed up. i have no idea what to do.

can you lead me step by step in disk utility to restore it to a drive for time machine?

anyone? i would like to back up my laptop before i sold it..

 

[wrongrobot]

wait... which drive was your time machine drive? an external?
what are you trying to do, restore your laptop's internal drive from an external time machine backup?

 

[bc008]

my time machine drive is an external.

i am trying to back up my laptop one last time before i restore to sell.

 

[wrongrobot]

...and you tried to reformat the internal for bootcamp?

Well, best i can figure it, you either trashed your external or your internal:

Internal:
you need to boot from installer, go into Disc Utility, reformat the entire internal volume as Extended Journaled, then install vanilla OSX from installer, THEN restore from Time Machine

or, which sounds more like what you describe, you trashed the external you were using as a time machine drive. You will not be able to recover data from previous TM attempts, if the entire drive was reformatted. I can't tell what you actually did. But if the objective is to restore functionality of the external as a TM drive for one last backup, then Disc Utilities, select the external, reformat the whole thing as Extended Journaled, then reboot laptop, let it find the external and ask to use it as a TM drive, or path TM directly to it.

Note you can only Bootcamp using an INTERNAL drive.

 

[bc008]

how do i reformat? i keep getting this message:


(and i am trying to get my external back to normal, i dont even care about backups at this point.)

 

[JNB]

If Time Machine is currently active & pointing to that external, I don't think the system will allow you to erase it. You'd have to turn off TM first.

Before you get any deeper, stop, take a breath, and let us know exactly what you have each drive (internal & external) partitioned for, what's currently on them, what you've already (successfully) done to them, and what you're specifically attempting to do. Incomplete descriptions lead to inaccurate advice.

 

[bc008]

time machine is turned off.

i only have one partition on my macbook, and i unsuccessfully made my external back to one. it says it is one, but that one partition wont back up.

 

[bc008]

edit: i got it to mount, but whenever i try to restore i get this series of errors