Restore Bad - What did I do wrong?
 

I was trying to run Apple Hardware Test and ended up finding myself in a position where the system would not boot from the internal hard drive. I booted from my backup drive and ran disk utility. Disk Utility failed to repair the internal drive and recommended that I reformat it. So I deleted the Macintosh HD partition and re-created ir with disk utility.

I the ran Super Duper, selected Restore, Erase Macintosh HD before copy, and do full restore. I waited the few hours it took to restore, clicked Startup in the System Preferences, and selected the Macintosh HD.

Upon restart, the Mac kept doing a kernel panic and would not boot. I tried to boot from the backup drive again and it did a kernel panic then too. Now somehow the recovery partition is gone.

I am current doing the internet recovery of OS X Lion.

What did I do wrong????

I don't know, since the backup was just fine when you booted from it initially. Perhaps the kernel panic indicates a system problem? Where was the panic?

(Note that after Lion is restored, and it asks you if you want to restore, do so from the SuperDuper! backup - you can point to it.)

The panic was happening right after powering on. I could hold down the option key and select a drive to boot from but it had the panic stop regardless of which one I chose.

I do have Lion re-installed via the recovery mechanism. It only took 3 hours. When it started I did choose to migrate from a disk and chose the Super Duper backup drive. It copied everything over. (another 3 hours) Things are mostly working today. I've had to reinstall applications such as Parallels and Spotlight indexing is taking forever but at least I have everything.

I can't seem to run Apple Hardware Test which is what started this debacle. Not feeling good about what happened but once again SuperDuper saves my ass by keeping me from losing data. :)

The whole thing seems awfully weird. It's too bad you don't have the panic log...

I actually took some pictures of the screen with the iPhone. You can look at them here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/332777/IMG_0269.JPG

here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/332777/IMG_0270.JPG

and here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/332777/IMG_0271.JPG

And you got the same panic whether you started up from the restored drive *or* the backup drive you'd already successfully started up from?

BOTH. That was the really strange thing. I knew the backup drive was good because I had just booted from it and ran the restore to the internal hard drive. On top of that, I used the backup to migrate over my data once I re-installed Lion.

I was baffled too. It made absolutely no sense that it would not boot from the backup any longer. That is when I called Apple and they told me how to do the Internet Recovery.

Yeah, I have no idea what happened here. I don't know why a known good backup that had just worked would suddenly go "bad" and produce kernel panics.

I mean, the only thing I can think is that you had a bad kernel extension that was "good" in the kernel extension cache. So, the cached version worked, but the rebuilt cache (which happens on the copy) didn't. But, that would have caused the backup to fail on boot too, which didn't happen.

Well, that's why we store our data in utterly standard ways, that can be restored by anything, including migration, Disk Utility, etc. If something goes wrong, there are lots of options.

Glad you're OK!

Yes. Thanks for looking at it.

I definitely have something odd going on as I still experience some crashes even after the restoration. I have been using the rember app (gui shell for memtest) to test my memory and it passes in safe mode but fails in normal mode which definitely is pointing to some software as being the culprit.

I continue to try and run that issue down.

Once again, thanks to you and SuperDuper! for saving my data.

Finally got it figured out.

The 4GB DIMM in slot 4 was bad. Replaced the pair of 4GB DIMMs in the iMac and all is well.

Funny thing is I never really seen a bad memory module cause disk corruption but I guess it makes sense.

Had to re-install a few apps that were corrupted and have not seen a crash yet.

Thanks again.

Weird timing for a hardware failure; glad you're running again.