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My old hard drive had been making alarming clunking noises (more than is usual) and causing the system to hang, therefore I thought it best to replace the drive.

So after making sure the Time Machine backup was up to date, I replaced the HDD, and booted the computer with the OS X DVD. I was slightly surprised to find that my wireless mouse worked, but that it didn’t take me to disk utility to format the new internal hard drive. With hindsight, that might be because I had an external firewire HDD plugged in.

So after manually formatting the HDD I installed Leopard (excluding the 4GB of extra languages and printer drivers), after a wait of about 40 minutes and one reboot it asked me the usual language/locations questions then where I wanted to migrate my data from. Select the latest time machine backup, wait another 2 hours or so (I went out) and my system was good as new, even my desktop wallpaper was the same.

All well and good, I though. But wait, the zoom function my Logitech mouse isn’t working properly, and when i went to open iTunes, it told me it couldn’t open my library as it was created with a more recent version of iTunes :/

Aha, try software update, 13 new items. Wait for the 400MB odd to download, and another reboot to install.

iTunes now worked, as did my mouse, and Saft for Safari (which is excellent by the way). The only thing I have found that is not exactly the way it was before I switched hard drives is the (manually edited) hosts file, which I use for adblocking, and that time machine was not enabled! Everything else worked flawlessly.

A couple of thoughts:

• Why doesn’t time machine enable itself after restoring the system from a time machine backup? It proved its usefulness and then disabled itself.


• After restoring from a time machine backup (or any other instal for that matter) should software update not open? I had kindof assumed that the restore would include updates, but obviously it doesn’t back up system files to save space (which is fair enough)


• Why was I suffering for so long spending hours and hours restoring Windows computers whenever they went a bit haywire.

This entry was posted on Saturday 15th March 2008 in Computers and tagged apple, backup, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.