Help with a strange Mac / Time Machine Restore Problem - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

Captain_Obvious · 11-10-2012, 12:49 AM

Thought about putting this in the quick question thread but my explanation of the problem is more than a couple sentences so am making a thread hoping some mac-savvy posters might be able to help.

Have a really strange issue happening with my macbook in regards to restoring from Time Machine.

I did a clean install of Mountain Lion. I must have missed the part when installing where it asks to back up from Time Machine. It loaded up to the new blank desktop and I tried to restore there from TM. I selected the last good backup and hit restore. My system and files was about 420 gigs. It took about four hours and said "copying". It completed... and nothing happened. My files / applications were nowhere to be seen.

Now when I look at how much space of my hard drive is being used, it say 422 gigs but none of those files that would account for that space are anywhere to be seen.

I'm trying to use migration assistant to do a full restore but it won't let me because there isn't enough space.

I need to find that 422 gigs and delete it, but it's nowhere to be found.

Any suggestions?

sclitheroe · 11-10-2012, 09:35 AM

Is your user account name the same on the old and new installs? I wonder if it created a second account and restored the data there?

sclitheroe · 11-10-2012, 09:46 AM

Also more generally, why are you doing a clean install? It's extremely unlikely to improve performance, and most other issues on OS X are fairly easy to narrow down and fix. I'd seriously consider just booting from the DVD and restoring the entire system from your last Time Machine backup.

Milt Schmidt · 11-10-2012, 10:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Is your user account name the same on the old and new installs? I wonder if it created a second account and restored the data there?

This is what happened to my GF on a new mac a couple months ago; didn't migrate on first boot, time machine looked like it had failed but it had just created a another user account with all her data.

Milt

Captain_Obvious · 11-10-2012, 04:38 PM

Thanks for the suggestions.

I am not sure how I'd look to see if it was transferred under a newly created account. If I go to logout, there's no option to log in under a 2nd account.

Any idea how I could check to see if that's the issue?

I am also in a tough spot now because I can't re-install as my CD drive doesn't work.

It's quite the problem at this point. Am dreading taking in to get serviced as I live in the Red Deer area but I might not have any other choice.

sclitheroe · 11-10-2012, 06:36 PM

The data is there, almost certainly.

Click on the Finder icon in the dock, and from the menubar do Finder -> Go To Folder -> and type in /Users, and hit Go. It has to be a forward slash (below the return key), not a backslash (below delete or backspace)

What folders do you see listed? There should be one for your current user account, one called Shared, and I'm betting one more, and that one more is where your data is.

GoFlamesGo89 · 11-10-2012, 07:24 PM

You could also use something like Disk Inventory X to search for large folders /directories etc. I assume some of that 420GBs is in music files or video which should light up pretty easily on the graphical interface...

Captain_Obvious · 11-10-2012, 07:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

The data is there, almost certainly.

Click on the Finder icon in the dock, and from the menubar do Finder -> Go To Folder -> and type in /Users, and hit Go. It has to be a forward slash (below the return key), not a backslash (below delete or backspace)

What folders do you see listed? There should be one for your current user account, one called Shared, and I'm betting one more, and that one more is where your data is.

Thanks, I tried this and it just lists the two, my current user account and shared. Unfortunately no 3rd mystery folder. Good suggestion though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoFlamesGo89

You could also use something like Disk Inventory X to search for large folders /directories etc. I assume some of that 420GBs is in music files or video which should light up pretty easily on the graphical interface...

Thanks I will look in to this. It's mostly video and project files from iMovie that take up most of the bulk.

Captain_Obvious · 11-10-2012, 07:44 PM

Here's a look at the "about this mac" tab telling me there's 430+ gigs being taken up but it lists it all as "other"

sclitheroe · 11-10-2012, 08:55 PM

Definitely go grab Disk Inventory X and run it - you'll be able to see very quickly where the data is hiding, as GFG has suggested.

Were you running Mountain Lion prior to this problem? Or did you upgrade to ML and then try and do the time machine restore?

Captain_Obvious · 11-10-2012, 09:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Definitely go grab Disk Inventory X and run it - you'll be able to see very quickly where the data is hiding, as GFG has suggested.

Were you running Mountain Lion prior to this problem? Or did you upgrade to ML and then try and do the time machine restore?

Will do I will try this tonight, thanks guys.

I upgraded to Mountain Lion and ran into this problem when I tried to restore.

Will advise how the Disk Inventory X goes.

sclitheroe · 11-11-2012, 09:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Obvious

Will do I will try this tonight, thanks guys.

I upgraded to Mountain Lion and ran into this problem when I tried to restore.

Will advise how the Disk Inventory X goes.

Disk Inventory X will let you visually figure out where that data has gone - once we know that, we'll be able to figure out what happened and advise on how to move the data to the correct spot (or remove it for another restore attempt).

The app doesn't make any changes to the system - it's safe to run.

Captain_Obvious · 11-11-2012, 10:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Disk Inventory X will let you visually figure out where that data has gone - once we know that, we'll be able to figure out what happened and advise on how to move the data to the correct spot (or remove it for another restore attempt).

The app doesn't make any changes to the system - it's safe to run.

Thanks for the help guys, the Disk Inv X located the files...

It lists the path as:

/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/Mymac/

And all the data files from my old backup are in there.

I just used the finder to navagate to that folder and sure enough they all came up.

Thanks for the offer to help remotely sclitheroe, but I think now that I found the files I should be ok.

I was thinking I'd just delete them and try doing time machine over again, this time through migration assistant instead of just copying them over (which is where I feel like I went wrong last time).

Does that sound like my best plan of action now?

Again thanks for the help guys, the Disk Inv X thing worked like a charm!

sclitheroe · 11-11-2012, 11:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Obvious

Thanks for the help guys, the Disk Inv X located the files...

It lists the path as:

/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/Mymac/

And all the data files from my old backup are in there.

Your previous screenshot for disk usage showed your boot partition as being called "Mac HD", and the mount point where you found your files showed is listed as /Volumes/Macintosh HD (this also explains why there wasn't a third folder in /Users as we expected)

So you've either partitioned the hard drive into two partitions, or you've got a disk bundle called "Macintosh HD" mounted. I'm betting you've got a disk image containing all your old data - we want to unmount that and remove it, then you can give the migration util a shot.

Can you open up terminal, type "mount" (without the quotes) and copy and paste the output here:

Then in terminal again, type "hdiutil info | grep image-path" (without quotes) and copy and paste the output here:

Captain_Obvious · 11-11-2012, 11:34 AM

Thanks, here's the info:

mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)

hdiutil info | grep image-path

Doesn't bring up anything... it just repeats the command like there when I open terminal

sclitheroe · 11-11-2012, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Obvious

Thanks, here's the info:

mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)

hdiutil info | grep image-path

Doesn't bring up anything... it just repeats the command like there when I open terminal

How about "ls /Volumes" ?

Captain_Obvious · 11-11-2012, 11:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

How about "ls /Volumes" ?

ls /Volumes
Mac HD Macintosh HD

sclitheroe · 11-11-2012, 11:46 AM

So there's only one partition, and the data that was restored wasn't restored into a disk image - it's actually sitting in /Volumes/Macintosh HD physically.

I think you'd be OK to delete that "Macintosh HD" folder from /Volumes, empty the trash, and then proceed with the migration util.

Maybe just before doing the deletion to clean up the disk space, fire up the migration util and double check that it can find the Time Machine backups and you can at least get it ready to do the work - no sense in deleting stuff if we aren't positive we can get it back again from the backup.

Captain_Obvious · 11-11-2012, 11:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

So there's only one partition, and the data that was restored wasn't restored into a disk image - it's actually sitting in /Volumes/Macintosh HD physically.

I think you'd be OK to delete that "Macintosh HD" folder from /Volumes, empty the trash, and then proceed with the migration util.

Maybe just before doing the deletion to clean up the disk space, fire up the migration util and double check that it can find the Time Machine backups and you can at least get it ready to do the work - no sense in deleting stuff if we aren't positive we can get it back again from the backup.

Sounds good I will check in to it, thanks.

I will keep you posted. Really appreciate the help.

sclitheroe · 11-11-2012, 12:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Obvious

Sounds good I will check in to it, thanks.

I will keep you posted. Really appreciate the help.

Should be straight forward - migration assistant will definitely be the correct approach at this point.

What has happened is that the boot disk name changed between the backup and install - it's now Mac HD instead of Macintosh HD. So when you try a normal time machine restore, it expects to plop all the data back where it came from, which at the top-most level is /Volumes/Macintosh HD. It doesn't know that it needs to restore into /Volumes/Mac HD instead, which is why all that data is sitting in a folder inside /Volumes rather than being put back where it belongs.