Booting from backup

[guruuno]

"Mac OS Extended" format.

Journaled or no Journaled?

[dnanian]

Try without Journaling so we can see if that makes a difference for your particular drive. Some drives have problems with Journaling.

[guruuno]

Over the last week or so, I have been unsuccessful in being able to move my OS X to a larger drive.

I've bought your software, tried just about every tool and app out there, read all the forums to the best of my ability, stayed up until 3-4 AM many days, tried things a bazillion different ways, and so forth. Sheesh, I even went without sex for a whole week! Not that tells you how much I am serious about finding a solution.

Let me say first, I appreciae all the assistance given here. Without it, my progress would have been dead.

I gave up.

I reinstalled, did a Migration, done.

What a pain in the butt!!

Searching for the total complete answer to the backup/cloning issue, I stumbled across this article.

The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/...nder-mac-os-x/

Bottom line in my opinion afer reading this: There is no solution that works 100% of the time, LIKE IT DOES ON A PC, so we must all wait for that solution, and until then, this OS may be only for the real techie, as the 'average' consumer, needs a backup process that "works", in addition to the Corporate client.

So, is OS X ready for prime time?

Maybe, but things need to be made available for it to be a 100% competitor.....and I haven't even begun to look at the other things that do or do not work, are easy or hard, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it all, and am a certified OS X convert, but things just gotta get better to be the #1 OS to come in the future.

[dnanian]

I really don't know why you had so much trouble, Bob. I just never had enough information to help.

And to state that something works "100% of the time" on the PC is kinda funny. I've had extensive PC experience myself, and we've had plenty of trouble with Norton and Acronis and many of the other PC-based solutions.

Nothing works 100% of the time. But, we try to be here for you when you have trouble. (No, not at midnight on Saturday, sorry. )

[brich]

I spend half of my work day on XP systems and the other half on OSX systems. In my experience and opinion, SuperDuper is among the most reliable and user-friendly apps available to geeks and newbies alike. Like anything else, the key is to use it with the right tools to get the intended result. For many SD users, the best tool is an external firewire drive that has been confirmed to be bootable and compatible with SuperDuper.

A quick perusal of this and other threads will provide suggestions that save time and aggravation for folks like the original poster.

[kentr]

Hope it's ok to revive this thread. Thought it would be better to consolidate threads on this issue.

The problem: it starts to boot then crashes (the kernel panic screen).

It's a Buffalo MiniStation Metro USB, 320GB, partitioned to 160GB with GUID / Journaled. The other partition with Snow Leopard boots fine.

Backup was made running Tiger.

I zeroed out the partition (both the data and free space), and backed up with Erase, then copy

Is it likely that the backup was incomplete and some files were corrupt?

[dnanian]

Is the old backup from a different Mac?

[kentr]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Is the old backup from a different Mac?

No, same mac (2.33GHz Intel PB Pro). I made the backup, then immediately tried to boot from it. Tried booting a couple of times with same result.

To attempt to restore corrupted files, can I just drag / drop system files to re-copy them to the BU?

Edit: I just checked the partition with DiskUtility and it was OK.

[dnanian]

Before you do that, can you start up with Shift held down from power on?

[kentr]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Before you do that, can you start up with Shift held down from power on?

Didn't work...

[dnanian]

Did you make this copy while running OS X 10.4, of a 10.4 disk? Or did you make a copy of Snow Leopard from Tiger (or vice versa)?

[kentr]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Did you make this copy while running OS X 10.4, of a 10.4 disk? Or did you make a copy of Snow Leopard from Tiger (or vice versa)?

Made it while running 10.4, booted normally from the internal drive. The copy is 10.4 (so, it was a copy of the startup disk). I used a separate administrator account because my main account is a Filevault acct.

Snow Leopard (10.6) wasn't installed at that time. After I used SuperDuper! to make the copy of 10.4, I fresh installed 10.6 onto another partition of the same external HD. I haven't installed 10.6 onto the internal yet b/c I want a solid backup first.

This was SD! 2.5, btw. Sorry I didn't mention that.

I'm happy to wipe it and make a fresh copy if it's required, but since it's so time-consuming I'd rather avoid it if there's some way I can just re-do the system files...

I think I'll just do that and let it run while I do some chores. The drive has some TurboUSB software, so maybe that's interfering with it somehow as well.

[dnanian]

It's certainly possible... very hard to know. It might be useful to start up while holding down Cmd+opt+v (which goes into 'verbose boot') to see if there are any useful diagnostics printed when it fails...