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Time Machine killed my Mac

I

irishandy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 20, 2011
6
0
I just tried to recover my whole system from a TM backup, and now the mac won't boot. It gets about 20 seconds in and then comes up with a window telling me to cold restart.. Only problem is it then keeps doing that - never recovering.

How can I salvage this? How can I boot from an OSX install disc in order to refresh the system?

HELP!!
 
I ran the install programme from the leopard install disc and selected recover from time machine from the options menu. I selected my most recent back up from my time machine drive and it all seemed to run ok - even got the congrats message at thevend before the reboot.
 
Have you excluded anything from Time Machine?

Time Machine will fail to restore from my experience if you exclude certain things from Time machine.
 
No, nothing was excluded.

To be honest, my pressing matter right now is how to get the mac to boot up in any way shale or form. Is there a key I can press to make it boot from the optical drive, or some other method. I'm content that all my data is still on the TM backup drive, so I can sort that problem later, but at the moment I've got a mac which won't boot at all!!
 
With the DVD in the drive, boot and hold down the option key to get a choice of drives to boot from. I believe holding down the 'C' key forces it to boot from the DVD/CD drive (as another alternative).

Having been-there done-that, your issue is why I make a copy of the system disk to an external drive every 6 months via carbon copy. Just in case.
 
You could always just reinstall OSX from scratch via the DVD and then during the welcome process use the migration assistant to pull from your Time Machine backup.
 
irishandy said:
No, nothing was excluded.

To be honest, my pressing matter right now is how to get the mac to boot up in any way shale or form. Is there a key I can press to make it boot from the optical drive, or some other method. I'm content that all my data is still on the TM backup drive, so I can sort that problem later, but at the moment I've got a mac which won't boot at all!!
Click to expand...

Odd...that it failed. Have you looked into the logs to see any errors during the restore progress? You proberly won't see anything in the logs.

tomllama said:
With the DVD in the drive, boot and hold down the option key to get a choice of drives to boot from. I believe holding down the 'C' key forces it to boot from the DVD/CD drive (as another alternative).

Having been-there done-that, your issue is why I make a copy of the system disk to an external drive every 6 months via carbon copy. Just in case.
Click to expand...

Jukas said:
You could always just reinstall OSX from scratch via the DVD and then during the welcome process use the migration assistant to pull from your Time Machine backup.
Click to expand...



You would have no other way but to reinstall OSX and use the mirgration assistant...
 
Thanks for the advice. Now I just need to borrow a wired keyboard from someone as the wireless one won't work obviously!!
 
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