How does Time Machine Handle new Hard Drive Installs

[Superman730]

Hey everyone, this question is related to Yosemite sort of so I hope I'm posting in the correct area.

I bought an SSD for my wife for Christmas and am going to put it in her Macbook. She's not running Yosemite yet and I wanted to avoid upgrading because her computer is older and I don't want to bog it down at least until I upgrade her RAM to 8 gigs (some of you may have seen my post a few weeks back about THAT lol).

I have a flash drive set up with Yosemite since I just did an install on a Macbook Pro a few days ago for my brother. For that, we installed OS X fresh without using a Time Machine back up since my brother wanted a clean slate.

I have a Time Machine back up of my wife's computer, if I install the new hard drive and boot to the flash drive but select restore from the Time Machine back up, will it install Yosemite from the flash drive and then restore all the files and settings from the back up or will it install Mavericks with everything else intact? I feel like it will install Yosemite and then put all the files in place TBH.

Thanks in advance for anyone's help!

 

[Weaselboy]

You can actually boot right to the TM disk. Just install the new SSD then option key boot to the TM disk. You will get the normal recovery screen. From there use Disk Util to format the SSD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then quit Disk Util and click restore and Mavericks and all her apps and data will be put back on the SSD.

After it is done reboot to the SSD and go into System Prefs and in the startup disk pane set the SSD as the boot drive.