Can I salvage this volume restore?

August 16, 2006 7:08 PM

I need to restore a Mac OS X hard drive. My target volume is 300GB. My source volume is a sparse image from a 500GB drive with only 179GB used, but of course, Disk Utility is looking at the total space on the volumes, not the used space. Is there any way to force this operation, modify the volume size of the sparse image, or do this in any way that will be less painful than reinstalling all my apps and settings from scratch?

Not too much to add... My 500GB hard drive went south, and for reasons too convoluted to go into here, wasn't covered under warranty. I have a very recent disk image backup, so I wasn't too worried about data loss. But I really didn't need a 500GB hard drive, and the price jump from 300GB to 500GB was substantial, so I opted for a 300GB drive.

Now, I'm trying to use the restore feature in Apple's Disk Utility, and predictably, I seem to have screwed myself. If I have to restore everything by hand, I can do it, but I'll be very annoyed. Is there any way I can salvage this restore?

Thanks!

posted by j-dawg to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Mount the disk image, run Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the disk image to the new drive.
posted by kindall at 7:47 PM on August 16, 2006

Mount the disk image, run the ditto utility already built in to OSX to copy everything from the disk image to the new drive.
posted by majick at 8:07 PM on August 16, 2006

i just did something similar using Carbon Copy Cloner. It is the best thing since sliced bread.
posted by birdherder at 8:13 PM on August 16, 2006

Another one who's done just this with Carbon Copy Cloner.
posted by holgate at 8:15 PM on August 16, 2006

I'm not sure what this Carbon Copy thing is since I'm not an OSX person but on the command line,
cp -a /Volumes/thebackup/* /destination
will do what you need, I think.
posted by polyglot at 11:16 PM on August 16, 2006

Thanks, everyone! Two updates of possible use to those using this thread in the future.

1. I had success with CCC, but when I rebooted, my username and password weren't recognized. I did a little digging, and found out that the problem was probably that the NetInfo datatabse hasn't copied correctly. The fix was to force the Mac to rerun setup. Here's a link to the instructions in case someone else needs to do the same.

2. I think the volume size mismatch was a genuine issue, but my subsequent Googling also uncovered this little nugget: The Restore tab on Disk Utility on the Intel iMac boot disk is purely decorative, and doesn't actually do squat. I hope this factoid will help keep someone else from banging their head against the table for half an hour like I did.
posted by j-dawg at 7:10 AM on August 17, 2006

Rereading that, I realize I should specify: it's the disk utiility on the Intel iMac boot DVD that's useless.
posted by j-dawg at 8:07 AM on August 17, 2006