Help! Time Machine Restore not working!

I am trying to restore to a Time Machine backup from a few days ago (same hard drive and everything). Tried 3 times and no success. Here is what I did:

1.) Boot from my original restore disc that came with my MBP
2.) Erase the hard drive with Disk Utility by making an new single partition
3.) Select to restore from a backup
4.) Run the restore (takes about 55 minutes) and reboot.

My problem is, when it's trying to boot up again, all I see is the gray Apple logo with the little spinning "wheel" below it. I've even let it sit there like that for over an hour...no luck.

On my 3rd attempt, I even tried to go back one restore date earlier...still no luck.

I am in the middle of trying via another method by installing the OS again from scratch with a different generic user name and then going to try to restore from the TM backup after in the OS.

Any ideas what my problem might be? Thanks!

 

No, I did not try those options. If this method I am in the middle of fails, I'll try that though. Very frustrating. When I did TM restores in the past (last was maybe 2 months ago, it was the the smoothest restore I had ever done without any issues.

 

Ok, the "fresh" install just booted and came up fine. What is weird though is it wasn't completely like a fresh installation. It came up looking like my last TM restore (which was one version earlier than I originally intended, but was the last I had tried). It prompted me for my network info again.

One thing I need to do now is to run the software update because it looks like my 10.6.6 is lost (probably since the restore disc had 10.6.4). Downloading now which will take a while again.

I'm guessing then, after it updates and restarts, I can then try to restore to the TM backup that I originally targeted in the first place? To avoid confusion, I'll refer to the one that I originally targeted as TM-A and the one that came up with this most recent attempt as TM-B.