04-03-2011, 01:59 AM

I'm gonna buy a larger drive for my computer and currently I have a series of time machine backups in my external drive. When I buy and install the new drive I would like to know how transfer that data to my internal. Since the internal drive will be blank I heard the option to "restore from time machine backup" will be greyed out. If so, how would I transfer my data? By the way, I also heard that restoring is not as "clean" as reinstalling from scratch, is this true?

EDIT: What exactly does a time machine even backup? I'm assuming everything, down to the system preferences correct?

04-03-2011, 05:19 AM

I just slapped a 750gb in my MacBook Pro about 2 weeks ago. Before you swap the hd's put the OSX install CD into the computer and then shut it down. Swap the hd's, hold down "c" while it boot's up. That will boot from the CD. Once you have chosen your language you will see up on the top of the screen "Utilities" Go to the disk utility Erase the HD using the journaled selection to reformat. Then go to the "Restore" under Utilities and back up from Time Machine. I have 215gigs on the computer and it took about 7 hours over the network with a USB external. When I opened Mail up I thought I'd lost it but it reappeared after clicking continue or something like that. Everything is exactly like it was except I have over 500gb of free space. There's also a couple of video's and write ups floating around out there. Good Luck

04-03-2011, 12:02 PM

Thanks for the explanation! It's gonna help me a lot once I get my hard drive.