OK, I got the two new drives today, replaced my dead internal drive with one of them, and used Time Machine to restore the contents of the dead drive to the new one. I was successful, but only on the second try. I didn't do it the right way the first time around, I guess.
The first time I tried to restore the contents of the drive, I did it through Time Machine's "Star Wars" interface. After booting up the Mac with the old internal drive that still works, and seeing that the new drive was on the desktop, I went into Time Machine, located the folder that contained the contents of the dead drive (named "Internal 1000"), highlighted it, and hit "Restore." TM then asked where I wanted to put the data, I chose the new drive, and TM copied all the stuff onto it. Notice that it said it was "copying" all the "items" from the dead drive to the new one. In other words, it did not say it was restoring the drive, like I wanted it to, it said it was copying the data onto it. I let it go ahead and do it, though, and It took a few hours, and when it was done, I opened up the new drive's window and saw that all the data was inside a folder titled "Internal 1000." I opened the folder and tried to launch a couple of the restored Final Cut Pro projects, but they would not open. They got stuck on a dialogue box that said something about "Final Cut Documents folder missing." I had sort of expected something like that. On the original drive, all the stuff was out in the open in the drive's window, it was not inside of a folder like that. And Final Cut is very fussy about folders. So, I decided to try the other method of restoring data with Time Machine. First I erased the new drive, to start over from scratch, and then I restarted the Mac with the Leopard installer disk, by holding down the C key. After the Leopard Installer disk booted up and took control, I used its Utilities menu to choose Restore with Time Machine (I think that's what it was called), and this time TM offered more choices. It showed both "Internal 1000" and Internal "Internal 1000 10.5.6." available to restore from. I figured the latter was just offering to restore the OS only, so I chose "Internal 1000," and TM then offered me the whole list of that drive's backups from the day the it failed on back several weeks. Naturally I chose the most recent backup and hit "Restore." This time TM did not say that it was "copying items," it said it was Restoring the Disk, which is what I wanted. And sure enough, four hours later, I was able to open the new hard drive's window, and there was everything sitting out in the open just like it had been on the old drive. This time, all the Final Cut video projects opened up just fine, although in some cases they complained of missing render files, but all I had to do to fix that was tell Final Cut to render the videos over again. And all is well! Everything works, so far! So, I guess there is a wrong way and a right way to restore the contents of a drive with Time Machine, and of course I picked the wrong way first. I have now turned Time Machine off, to prevent it from backing up the contents of the new drive until I'm sure everything is fine with it, so I'll go a few days this way and keep testing everything out. So far, everything seems to be working fine. All my stuff is back, and Time Machine has proven itself to be a very valuable asset! After a few days, I'll replace the old boot drive with the other new hard drive, and use the Leopard disk to restore the contents of that drive also. Then I'll be right back where I was before the other drive failed, except I'll be running two brand new hard drives that shouldn't fail for years, I hope! But I'm going to keep those five year warranty papers handy, and I'm going to keep Time Machine on the job! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
