restore from external usb drive

[drew g]

my mom's hard drive was failing on her ibook so i got her setup with a registered copy of SD. she was able to backup everything to an external usb drive. hard drive on the ibook finally crashed and she just got her replacement back.

i realize since her backup is on usb it's not bootable. what would be the best way for me to restore her ibook?

checked the faq's and did some searches so apologize if i'm missing something. i'm thinking i need to create a disk image of the usb drive then restore (both via disk image utility)?

any suggestions appreciated! my mom is in town for a few more days and i'd like to get her back up and running...

[dnanian]

You'll use Disk Utility to restore from the drive. See the "Recovering from a disaster" chapter in the User's Guide, Drew.

[drew g]

Dave, thanks for your response. I followed the instructions from the user's guide, using disk utility to restore from the external drive. about 3/4 of the way through I received an error message:

"an error (2) occurred while copying. (no such file or directory)"

no other information was given beyond that message.

would you suggest i create a disk image of my mom's backup drive with SD and try to restore from that? (when she did her backup, it was 'all files' and not a disk image). if so, can i create that disk image on her usb drive along with all her data? or, is it possible to clone her usb drive over to a lacie firewire drive and make that bootable and therefore possibly easier to restore from?

i feel like i might be overcomplicating things when there might be just a simple solution. any suggestions welcome! thanks,

[dnanian]

No, creating a disk image won't help. Do you have another Mac you can run SuperDuper! on, Drew, and then connect the USB drive and the Mac through FireWire Target Disk Mode? I don't really have enough information with that message to be able to help...

[drew g]

Dave - used another mac, connected the usb drive to that and then the ibook in target mode...ran SD to copy the usb contents back over to the ibook.

worked perfectly. my mom's ibook is now completely restored =)

thanks much for your suggestions and your customer support!!

[dnanian]

Glad to hear it, drew! Always a bit nervewracking when you've just broken your Mom's Mac...