So I recently went through a two day ordeal caused by both a dying hard drive and my cheapness. A parade of software failures like this one should be written down for posterity anyway. Read on for some tips on what to do and what to avoid if your Time Machine restore fails as spectacularly as mine did...
When my MacBook started beachballing during heavy disk IO, I looked in the logs and found several tell-tale kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED) messages. I suspected an imminent HDD death so I deleted a few newly created files that I knew were damaged, and ran Time Machine one last time. Things went OK. After running TechTool Pro and verifying that I did indeed have bad blocks (5 to be exact!), I figured that I might still put off buying a new hdd by choosing the "Zero All Data" option and reformatting the drive. Sure enough, several hours later, I had zeroed the drive and received a clean bill of health from TechTool's surface scan.
Next I tried booting the Leopard DVD and running a Time Machine restore. It wasn't that easy since my TM volume lives on an unsupported share on my 10.4 Client file-serving G4. Time Machine couldn't find the drive and never offered me to connect to any servers. Manually mounting the drive didn't help either. The Join button remained greyed out. I had no choice but to pull the drive from my server and hook it up to the MacBook since Target disk mode also failed spectacularly. Apparently a boot raid in a Gig-Ethernet G4 will cause Target disk mode to "fall through". I was still calm at this point, since I was using a totally unsupported method to have a networked Time Machine.
OK, so I copied the sparse bundle to a single drive and copied along the two "." files that seem to go with TM's system just in case. I rebooted with the Leopard DVD and it happily found my Time Machine! I hit restore and let it to its thing for a couple of hours. When it finished up, I hit restart and held my breath. The MacBook restarted, and then restarted again, and then restarted again. No amount of pram zapping, option key-holding trickery would break the loop.
I was pretty beaten down by Technology at this point so I took a break to drink a beer. I decided that I'd try to do a clean install of Leopard and give the Migration Assistant a shot since it now offers Time Machine support.
I yet again formatted my drive, partitioned for Boot Camp and clean installed Leopard. After the install I created a temp account and matched the system up to the same 10.5.2 OS via Software Update.
I fired up Migration Assistant and told it I wanted to use Time Machine. It, however, claimed to not find any Time Machines. YARGH! OK, so I figure I'd mount the sparse Image and see what happens. As soon as I finished mounting the image, Migration Assistant updated its list and offers to pull from this mounted Time Machine dmg! I selected the user accounts and told it to copy over everything. About 1.5 hours later it reported success. I skeptically logged into my old user account and everything seems perfect! Success? Could it really be? Well, it was, for a few minutes.
I decided to push my luck and try to also restore my Boot Camp partition from a backup made with the great WinClone. Unfortunately I was a total dumbass and made the partition 1 GB too small. When I enlisted Boot Camp Assistant to return my drive to a single Mac OS volume, I received a success message... but then when I tried to re-partition for Boot Camp, I received a series of strange error messages. I did a stupid thing and rebooted. TOTAL FAILURE. Turns out Boot Camp Assistant wiped out my partition table.
Another over-night format and restore session finally yielded a working MacBook. Here's the no-whining summary:
- If your bare-metal restore fails or refuses to show up when booted from the Leopard DVD follow these steps:
- Partition your drive *exactly how you want it*
- Clean Install Leopard
- Create a temp account with a non-colliding name to use for updating your OS to match what is on Time Machine
- Mount the Time Machine sparseImage .dmg in the Finder (if your backup volume is a local HFS+ disk, this step doesn't apply)
- Launch Migration Assistant.
You might just end up with a working Mac like I did. Oh, try to avoid all the massive pitfalls I ran into, especially with Boot Camp Assistant. No offense Boot Camp team, but I've deemed this app beta, because of this mishap and another in the past --both resulting in totally destroyed partition tables and hours of time from my life!
