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Dave00

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 2, 2003
884
119
Pittsburgh
So, here's the situation. Got an old MacBook that I am in the process of transitioning to a new Retina MBP, and I seem to have lost most of my data, despite Time Machine backups. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

On the old Macbook, I have a 500MB hard drive partitioned into Drive 1 (300mb) and Drive 2 (200mb). Both partitions I set up as potential startup disks, but I really only ever used Drive 1. I've only had Time Machine backups for Drive 1, the last one being 2 weeks ago or so.

So, drive 1 has some sort of major catastrophic failure - can't boot to it, disk utility can't recover it. I changed the startup disk to Drive 2, which loaded fine. While in the process of seeing if I could do something to get Drive 1 to mount, Drive 2 decides to start a Time Machine backup. Now my Drive 1 Time Machine backup is no longer visible when I connect to Time Machine - just Drive 2. So I have my new Retina MBP but no Time Machine backup to restore to it.

I ordered DiskWarrior and am now in the process of recovering as much as I can from Disk 1. It's painfully slow and giving lots of errors, but I'll probably get most things back.

My question is, is there a way to get the Time Machine backup of Drive 1? It's absolutely nuts to me that a backup from another drive would just erase the first one, since there is plenty of room on the drive. I imagine it's even still there, just invisible. Would disk warrior be able to recover this? Secondly, is this normal behavior for Time Machine? I thought it could handle backups from multiple computers.

Dave
 
I've figured out something of a solution, and thought I'd post a solution here. If you hold down the option key when selecting a time machine backup, it allows you to select a different drive/computer. I booted to the installation DVD, which allowed me to install from a time machine backup - holding down option while going through the menu, it found my Drive 1 backup. Phew! Still copying files, but hopefully this will do the trick.
 
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