Can I recover when seeing the Spinning Beach Ball
 

I have a Mini (2009) running Snow Leopard, with SD backups made weekly to a USB-connected external drive. Last week my Mini froze and when I restarted it showed the Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I cannot boot, even in Safe Mode -- I get to the "Log In" step and then the BBall just spins and spins. Is there a way to recover under that scenario? I'd like to try it, even if it's just for the experience.

Question-2: I've now purchased a new (legacy) Mini (2009) with Snow Leopard installed. Can I use the SD sparsebundle file to recover to this different piece of hardware? I looked through the documentation PDF but the restore there talks about restoring to the device that was originally backed up. I'm not sure if things work differently when the recovery is to a different hardware ID.

Can you boot from the backup on another system? It's hard to know what your beachballing is, given what you're saying.

If the mini can run the same OS version, restoration should work, yes.

On one of my restart attempts I held down the OPT key but the sparseimage file on the USB-attached HD was not offered as one of the options for a startup drive. (My assumption was that it needed to be 'unpacked' so that it appeared on my desktop as the system image.)

After that, I wasn't able to get that far with any of the modes of doing a restart. I'll try Target Disk mode once I'm back where I have some firewire cables.

I'll give it a try, if the partition on the new Mini is large enough to hold the restored system.

Thanks.

Ah. As indicated in the User's Guide, images aren't real drives: they're virtual drives and cannot be started from until restored to an actual, boot-supported drive.

Yeah, that was my understanding. But I thought I'd give it a try, to see if there was some way I could get the image expanded and then point the restart to it.

If I get a new, empty HD I may try unpacking the image file there and then doing a restart - tho' the poor Mini now doesn't see to get far enough to get anything going. Target Drive mode may be my last hope ... and then all this work is for what? ... I'd have a Mini with a likely-flakey HD. So mostly this is for the 'learning'!

Thanks again.