Restoring from sparseimage file on NAS drive
 

I got myself into some trouble this weekend.

I needed to partition my hard drive this weekend in order to get Boot Camp working. I first performed a full backup to a sparseimage file on a Buffalo LinkStation NAS drive. I then rebooted using the original Mac OS install disc (OS 10.4 - Tiger) that came with the computer, and used Drive Utility to partition the drive.

I installed Tiger into the 2nd partition (the one I eventually would use to install Windows onto), then restarted using the 2nd partition as the startup drive, and then used Drive Utility to restore the sparseimage to the 1st partition.

That's where things went horribly wrong. On restart, the computer would freeze while the spinning icon displayed. I could boot up in Safe Mode, but got many error messages on startup (mostly having to do with missing references to files).

I tried another way to restore the image file to the drive - this time using SuperDuper 2.5. This time around, the computer would not even load in safe mode--the spinning startup icon just kept spinning.

How can I get my backup, which is now still in the form of a sparseimage file on a NAS drive, restored into a fully functional system?

I am expecting that you'll advise me to reinstall the OS. If that's the case--how can I transition all of my old preferences, application settings, etc., to the new OS instance?

System specs:
MacBook Pro, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
partition 1: 80GB
partiion 2: 20GB

Leopard is installed on the backup image. As noted above, I was using a Tiger install disc to do the formatting & repartitioning. Should I have done this from the Leopard DVD?

Thank you in advance!

-Jack

Yes, you should definitely do this with Leopard. Here's what I'd do.

Format into the two partitions, but make both of the HFS+. Install "clean" Leopard to one partition (the one that you do not want to restore to). Download and install SD! to that partition.

Open the image, select its (open) volume as the source volume, the other partition as the destination, and do a "Backup - all files".

Restart from the restored partition and reformat the other for Windows.

Thank you. Your suggestion is similar to what I did on my second restore attempt. The main difference is that I installed Tiger - not Leopard - onto the 2nd partition. I used SD 2.5 to do a full copy from the image to the 1st partition.

Do you know of a key difference that a clean Leopard install (vs. a clean Tiger install) would make?

Yes: Leopard's file system is significant different. You cannot restore a Leopard image or disk from Tiger.