Can't restore Macintosh HD (grayed out)

[strathglass]

I have booted from an image of my main HD (yes, I am NOT running from the drive I want to restore to, for sure!).

I want to copy from this image to my iMAC's internal HD, but that internal HD, "Macintosh HD" is grayed out.

I used DiskUtility to see if I could erase that drive first in case that would help: however on the erase screen for that drive, the Erase... button is grayed out!

How do I restore my external (Firewire 400) image of my boot drive back to the iMac's internal drive??????????????

Regards, Strathglass.

[dnanian]

You're running from Macintosh HD, Strathglass, no question about it. Check in the "About This Mac" panel.

[strathglass]

Originally Posted by dnanian

You're running from Macintosh HD, Strathglass, no question about it. Check in the "About This Mac" panel.

Looks like you are right.
And yet when I booted I picked the external firewire drive to boot from (held down option key at power up to get the choice).

So how can this be? How do I REALLY boot from my external OS drive image???

Regards, Strathglass.

[strathglass]

Update:
I answered my own question:
to REALLY boot from the external OS backup image, I simply selected the right drive in System Preferences/Systems/Startup Disk.

Now SuperDuper gives me the option to (smart)copy from my external OS image that I booted from to my internal Mac HD.
I will try that now!

-strathglass

[dnanian]

Well, both should work, but for some reason Option+startup didn't for you: I don't know why. Might have to do with a timeout, unresponsive external, etc.

[strathglass]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Well, both should work, but for some reason Option+startup didn't for you: I don't know why. Might have to do with a timeout, unresponsive external, etc.

Hmmm, oh well. At least the alternative method worked.

Anyways, after using preferences to be able to boot from the superduper backup drive, I was able to use my superduper backups from last night to restore my internal OS drive and external firewire drive (with my home directory) from the superduper backups...

...and everything worked fine!

I guess my SuperDuper purchase was a good investment!

The original problem was that my Mac hung during a software upgrade, and after forcefully rebooting to get out of that, all my preferences/personalization, like icons I added to the Dock, seemed to be lost!

One lesson learned: only do software upgrade right after you've done a SuperDuper backup of your system!!! (In this case it was more an accident than a plan that I did it this way)

Regards, Strathglass.