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Steve.P.JobsFan

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 27, 2010
1,010
613
Columbus
Can somebody be willing to explain this to me?

OK, so I bought a new iMac Friday night, and the specs are in my signature.

I have a WD drive with my Time Machine backups of my previous Mac. My previous Mac was a Mid-2007 20" model, with the upgraded 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM (Upgraded to 4GB via Crucial), and the Radeon HD X2600 PRO 256MB Graphics chip. The last 5 backups I did were with 10.7.2 installed. I took the new iMac out of the box, and it asked me "Do you want to transfer data from a Time Machine backup?" I did that, and restored my old Mac's files to the new one. Somehow, this completely brought the machine down. After I completed the Setup Assistant, I was looking at a gray screen for 20 minutes. I did a hard shutdown, and rebooted. I was stuck at the boot screen with the logo and a cog. I had to reinstall OS X 10.7.2, and I made a new account. I then opened Migration Assistant from the desktop, and transferred the data that way. I transferred my account and everything from the old iMac. After it was done, my new iMac was really slow. I clicked on the Apple menu to logout, and the thing completely locked up. NOTHING worked. None of the dock icons responded, Finder wouldn't work, System Preferences didn't open, I couldn't do anything. I reinstall Lion, and repeat the process. Make a temp account, and transfer all my data over. Same thing happened. The machine locked up, and nothing worked. I had to reinstall Lion again, and manually transfer my data over. Even then, 3/4 my apps had to be reinstalled and downloaded. What happened? Why did the Time Machine backup from the old iMac completely DESTROY my new iMac? I had to manually transfer my data over, and had the new iMac perform a Time Machine backup of all my data, onto the new Hitachi drive I bought, since the WD drive takes 20 minutes to mount. Can somebody please explain why restoring a backup destroyed my Mac? Did it replace system files or something? On my old iMac, I excluded the System folder from backups. I received a notification from my iMac, asking if I wanted to exclude just the folder, or ALL system files and folders. I excluded ALL system files and folders. Why did this kill the machine?
 
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