Time Machine restore after HD crash

[dreamsINdigital]

The hard drive in my MacBook died, and I replaced it with a new one. I'm trying to restore everything from Time Machine. First thing I did after installing the hard drive was boot from the OSX DVD and format the drive GUID and Mac OS X Journalized. I then selected to restore from Time Machine from the Utilities menu. It detected my backup, but it did not detect the new empty hard drive to allow me to restore it to (It did however, detect the other partition I have on my external drive).

I thought it wouldn't let me restore directly from the Time Machine backup because the drive did not have OSX on it. So I clean installed OSX onto the drive, and now the migration assistant is restoring from my Time Machine backup. Why was it not allowing me to restore from the backup? Is this how it's supposed to be done?

I suspect that this migration assistant restore isn't the same as restoring from the Time Machine backup after booting from the DVD. Would I have to reinstall OSX updates again?

It's also taking an extremely long time to transfer; it estimated about 35 GB to copy and it says about 14 hours remaining. It might be because it's a first gen MacBook that only supports SATA, and I'm using a SATAII hard drive, but I don't really think that should matter. I want to cancel this and try restoring from the Time Machine backup directly if that would make it go faster, but there is no cancel button. If I manually shut it down, would it cause damage?

Thanks

 

[dreamsINdigital]

This is exactly what my situation is here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1501778

From what those people say, it sounds like you can restore the Time Machine backup on a brand new hard drive without OSX on it. When I tried it, it detected my backup, but when it asked me where I wanted to restore it to and gave me a list of choices, it didn't detect my brand new hard drive. I'm thinking it might have just needed more time for it to be detected. In the list, it detected my spare partition on my external hard drive, but it was taking awhile to calculate the space. I didn't wait to see if my new hard drive would show up on the list after it finished calculating the space for my external drive; I just quit out of that and proceeded to install a fresh copy of OSX and used the migration assistant.

The migration assistant is down to 8 hours from 14. I'd only be pissed if the full restore from Time Machine via the DVD is a lot faster than this.

 

[jmann]

The reason it wasn't working is because the hard drive wasn't formatted, it needed to be formatted before anything can be put on it.

 

[dreamsINdigital]

The reason it wasn't working is because the hard drive wasn't formatted, it needed to be formatted before anything can be put on it.

I said the first thing I did was format it...

 

[miles01110]

It didn't work right after the format because TM isn't a bootable clone. If you copied the contents of the TM backup onto your drive, it wouldn't boot. It needs OS X installed in order to restore from the backup.

 

[pjmburg]

^Yep. Just start the installation and you should be able to restore everything you need from the Time Machine drive without a hitch during installation. The OS X install will technically be fresh, but all of your preferences, files, and apps will be in place, so you won't even know the difference.