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israces · Jul 25, 2011, 08:33 PM

So, it looks like I'll be the guinea pig on this one.

Early 2009 Mac mini. Upgraded to Lion this morning. Ran a time machine backup to an external USB drive. Heard the click of death on the mini's hard drive this afternoon. It locked up with the beach ball. Tried to reboot, shows a grey screen with a file folder and a flashinng question mark. Not good, I know. It's dead.

Got a new hard drive and am ready to get back up and running. What is the consensus on how to do this? Install SL from DVD then upgrade to Lion and then restore from time machine? Is there a better way?

Working on this right now, so any help would be appreciated. And yes, I am super lucky the time machine backup ran before the failure (maybe).

CharlesS · Jul 25, 2011, 08:35 PM

Unless you imaged the Lion installer onto a flash drive or a DVD before the hard drive died, then yes, your best bet is to reinstall Snow Leopard, redownload the Lion installer, and install that.

chabig · Jul 25, 2011, 09:02 PM

You don't have to redownload the Lion Installer. It's in the Applications folder on your Time Machine backup. So unless you have a bootable disk you will have to reinstall some version of Snow Leopard to boot the machine, but you shouldn't have to update it or redownload Lion. Just restore the Lion Installer from Time Machine and run it.

Once you're booted into your clean Lion install, migrate everything from your Time Machine to recover your accounts and files.

israces · Jul 25, 2011, 10:09 PM

So I have the new HDD in the mini and I was redownloading Lion on another machine to get the installer to make a bootable USB stick for getting the mini going again...until I saw the hot tip from chabig!!

I just pulled the installer from the time machine backup. Now I'm making the bootable USB stick. This is saving some serious time.

chabig · Jul 25, 2011, 10:13 PM

israces · Jul 25, 2011, 11:12 PM

USB boot stick worked like a charm. But here's the rub, I used an extra HDD that I had at home, which I just found out from time machine is a little too small for restoring my system. Need to go get another drive. It looks like this is going to work out just fine though.

Mike Pither · Jul 30, 2011, 06:58 AM

Hi all, I don't see the installer in the applications folder (or anywhere else) is it possibile that it is hidden for some reason ? On a slightly different point my macbook pro has Airdrop but my iMac no - most strange!

Cold Warrior · Jul 30, 2011, 09:09 AM

Originally Posted by Mike Pither

Hi all, I don't see the installer in the applications folder (or anywhere else) is it possibile that it is hidden for some reason ? On a slightly different point my macbook pro has Airdrop but my iMac no - most strange!

Airdrop has some hardware requirements in wifi.

AppleInsider | Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: AirDrop limited to modern Macs

For the Lion installer, it sounds like you've already installed Lion, in which case its installer has been deleted. To redownload, open the App Store, option-click Purchased, and redownload. Quit the installer when it launches.

israces · Aug 1, 2011, 12:20 AM

Originally Posted by Mike Pither

Hi all, I don't see the installer in the applications folder (or anywhere else) is it possibile that it is hidden for some reason ? On a slightly different point my macbook pro has Airdrop but my iMac no - most strange!

Look in the applications folder in your time machine backup. It should be in the backup version right around the time when you installed Lion. On mine, it was about 5 backups deep.

All this does is saves download time for redownloading Lion through the app store. It's the same file either way.

Mike Pither · Aug 3, 2011, 05:24 PM

ok thanks for the replies guys, I'll have a look for the installer in time machine.