Undoing a restore from time machine?

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I have a first generation AirBook. My hard drive recently began to fail and I had to have it replaced. When it was replaced, the Mac center upgraded my OS from 10.5.8 to 10.6.8.

Thinking that a restore would be relatively straightforward despite the change inOS, I tried to directly restore my data and settings from my last Time Machine backup. The restore saved my last backup onto my Disk Image, but my old files and applications are nowhere to be found, and my old settings have not been imported into the new OS. After (belatedly) browsing some forums, I realize I probably should have used Migration Assistant to move things over into the new OS (if I should have used another process, please advise). But now the problem is my earlier "restore" of about 60 GB of data is taking up too much space on the hard drive, there's not enough space for Migration Assistant to migrate my old files and programs (and I don't want redundancy with whatever I had "restored" before).

I am on a prolonged research trip in China, so I don't have the OS installation disk to simply reinstall OS. Is there a way for me to undo my previous "restore"? I.e. to delete the data that I loaded from Time Machine? I can't find where it is located.

I'm not sure that I articulating the problem in the correct terms. But thanks in advance for any advice or input.
 

chscag

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You can't undo a restore, and trying to manually remove files and folders may result in leaving the machine in a "brick" state. In other words, you won't be able to use it. I'm assuming you don't have an external MBA optical drive that you can use?

Otherwise, the easiest remedy is to buy a Snow Leopard DVD in China and use it to restore. You also may be able to find Apple service in China. You didn't say where in China you are, but we have had other members state they were able to get Apple service in China in various locations.
 
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Thanks! I am in and out of Beijing, so I will take it to the Genius Bar at a Beijing location and have them reboot the system. I really wish they had taken the extra bit of time to just restore my files/settings from my drive, rather than leaving it to me to mess up. :O
 

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