How do I restore a Mac OS X backup?

[PatrickGaerlan]

First the bad news, my PowerBook's hard disk died. Good news, I have a recent backup of my whole disk on an external Firewire drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3 to backup my system (I chose the "make bootable" option). I was able to get a new 80GB HD (thanks Ditoy!) and I wanted to know how to restore my system. My external Firewire HD is 120GB (1st partition: 20GB archive; 2nd partition: 60GB PowerBook backup; 3rd partition: 30GB iBook backup).

[peter_ob]

Won't C C Cing it back work?

[jakcfrost]

booting up using the system in the external hard drive then using carbon copy cloner to copy everything to the new hard disk should work. i did it once before, not sure if i had to format the new harddisk in my ibook, but i was able to transfer everything i backed up in the external hd

[Kenneth]

Yup, boot from your external HD, format your target HD and CCC everything. I've done this myself recently.

To do this, restart, and while your external HD is connected, hold down the option key. You will be able to choose which HD to boot from. You know the rest.

[PatrickGaerlan]

Thanks guys. Here's what I did:

1. As Kenneth pointed out, holding the option key down while restarting lets you choose which drive to boot from.

2. I then realized that I never tested if my backup actually booted... it didn't.

3. I restarted using the first Panther install CD, started Disk Utility, then chose restore. It let me choose the source and a destination. Gave it a shot because my backup files seemed to be intact, it just didn't want to boot. The restore completed successfully.

4. After restoring, I restarted, kinda hoping that it will boot. It still didn't (duh).

5. Restarted using the Panther install CD, reinstalled Panther (choosing Archive and Install and Preserve Users and Network Settings).

6. Was finally able to boot, I was glad to find that about 98% of the system was working as before, with all my settings preserved. Took me about an hour or two to reinstall some apps which weren't working properly (Palm Desktop, X11, etc.).

Finally, everything's up & running and back to normal (AFAIK). I now check everytime I backup (using Carbon Copy Cloner) if it actually boots.

[Edited on 10-1-2004 by PatrickGaerlan]