new hard drive unable to restore from time capsule

I have searched this forum and attempted several times and ways to use time capsule to restore to a new hard drive on my mac book running leopard. I installed the new hard drive, used the leopard install disk to format and partition the drive. After that I tried once to use airport and once to use ethernet (faster) to restore. Each time I received the "you need to restart your computer" message. When I restarted the computer it came back to the same message. Besides many hours of work, I am extremely frustrated and hope that this is not an issue with time capsule since I hold a lot of data on it, and fortunately not a crash, but a hard drive upgrade from the 160gb to a 320gb unit. I have 2 identical computers I am upgrading and I am getting the same results with both computers, so I dont think it is a corrupt hard drive or hardware issue unless it is in the time capsule.

I know this should not be this hard to figure out and complete. Can anyone tell me where I am going wrong here, and what the potential issues could be.

Thanks,

David

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Have you tried doing a clean install from your Leopard disc, connecting the capsule, go into Utilities and select Migration Assistant and copy from there?

No, but I will give that a try and let you know how it works. Thanks.

Ok I erased the hard drive, did a clean install of leopard and downloaded the updates. I then used the ethernet to restore the drive from the time capsule. It downloaded for quite a while, but did not transfer my applications and iphoto pictures even though I checked all the boxes to do that. The system seems to be running fine, but there is no indication that anything transferred over even though the hard drive is showing 126 gb of data stored on it.

What am i doing wrong?

Is 126GB about the amount of drive space used prior to doing the clean install? If so you may have to do a search for the missing files on your hard drive. Personally this is one reason I use SuperDuper rather than Time Machine.

One question why partition the drive prior to migrating everything across?

The original 160gb drive was full originally so it is short about 30gb or so. I searched for each of the applications and could not find any of them. I found my iphoto files, but even after upgrading to 7.1.5 says that the version i am using is not new enough to open iphoto. It appears that even though time capsule was showing 160gb of data, only 126gb retrieved when I did the restore.

Question: Given that I still have a usable original hard drive with good data on it, how would you recommend that I transfer that data to the new hard drive (as if I did not have time capsule at all). What hardware and software do i need to do it, and how?

Thanks for your help

iPhoto often makes updates to the Library and when done, means older versions of iPhoto will no longer be able to open those Libraries. You will need at least the same version (or newer) of iPhoto that was used to create the iPhoto Library on the TM backup.

Are you attempting to restore a TM backup that was created with a newer version of OS X? If so, that's going to be a problem.