Super Duper Not Working?

I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook and need to restore what was on my old drive to the new one.

I have an up to date Super Duper sparse bundle image on an external drive, as well as Super Duper. I restart the MacBook with an OS install disk, open Disk Utility and have been trying in vain to use it to restore my new drive from the image of the old one.

I choose the source as the image and then select Scan Image. The scan window appears briefly, then a dialogue box appears and says:

Unable to scan [name of disk image]. Invalid argument.

I am stuck and don't know what to do. The copy of Super Duper on the external drive I'm using can't be opened.

I'm very frustrated and would be extremely grateful for any help in how to get my computer working as I need..

Go into User Guide and look up Disaster Recovery and follow from there.

Why not simply clone the internal to the external nut using sparse image but a full clone/ this will be bootable and you could have just popped the new drive in, booted from the external and migrated everything over or cloned.

harryb2448 said:

Go into User Guide and look up Disaster Recovery and follow from there.

Why not simply clone the internal to the external nut using sparse image but a full clone/ this will be bootable and you could have just popped the new drive in, booted from the external and migrated everything over or cloned.

Click to expand...

I've already installed the new internal drive. Anything else I might do? External nut?

What you have described thus far, you are not using SD!, you are using Disk Utility.

Can you boot to the external drive? Have you tried?

If you can't, you don't want to restore from it to begin with as it's unlikely you'll have a bootable internal.

If you can, what do you mean by SD! can't be opened? What happens?

First question is ... did you use SuperDuper! to clone your internal drive to the external drive.
If you did, simply boot from the external disk, launch SuperDuper! from the external disk and clone the external disk back to the internal disk.
If you can not boot from the external disk, you will have to install the OS first onto your internal disk and copy stuff across from your external to the internal.

Cheers ... McBie

Here's what I believed could happen:

Using SD, I made an entire backup image of my former internal drive. Then I used SD's smart backup option to make subsequent backups and keep that file up to date. This image file with all of my backed up stuff was what I thought you used to restore a drive. It isn't?

I can boot off of the external only because Mavericks is on there and I get a recovery disk option. But it only lets me use Disk Utility.

I reinstalled Snow Leopard to my new internal drive, attached my external and tried it from there. No possible. Now I think i'll install Snow Leopard to the external and boot up from that. Maybe then I'll be able to access SD from that drive.

You need to boot to the external drive.

Reboot the machine while holding the option key.
When the selections appear - select the external drive - where Mavericks is installed - not the recovery partition.
This will boot up into Mavericks on the external.
Once booted to the external - you will then open SuperDuper! and the same as you cloned to the external, you will now clone it in reverse from the external to the internal.

I guess I was just plain dumb. I finally performed the proper sequence of procedures and dragged the disk image's "drive" icon to source, the new drive to destination and hit Restore. It's still copying and will take a while via USB 2, but it seems to be working. Gee, I've only used Macs since the 1970s.

Looks like you are on the right track

Let us know the results.

Cheers ... McBie

Ahh well ksternberg only another twenty or so years of learning to go lol!