I have a computer with a blank hard drive where, fortunately, the user has a complete Time Machine backup.
Unfortunately, my Leopard install Disc was eaten by an unhappy disk drive, and while I do have some install discs kicking about, they are model-specific and not for this model. I am able to boot the machine up into Leopard with an external hard drive or over the network.
Is it possible to do a full time machine restore without the installer disc?
I know this is an old question, but I just wanted to note that there are two useful tools that might have resolved this situation.
Migration Assistant - Boot up however you can and, with the Time Machine disc plugged in, open Migration Assistant. Choose to migrate using Time Machine, and get that all done, then...
SuperDuper! - Or any other good cloning software. I think Disk Utility can accomplish this just fine, but I'm not sure. Copy the external, bootable drive with all your newly migrated TM data to the internal, empty drive.
From there, just change whatever setting, user accounts permissions, etc you need to change, and you're done. And definitely do a software update.
No. I have a copy of my restore disc on my Time Machine drive so it is bootable. Good luck.
I booted the machine off another one in Target Disk Mode, and plugged in the Time Machine backup. A dialog asked something like, "Do you want to use the old backup volume", and, figuring it would be non-destructive, I said yes. [I may have gone into the Time Machine Preferences first].
I went into Time Machine and restored Macintosh HD onto the erased drive. Two-and-a-half hours later, I saw that the drive (MacHD) had a Macintosh HD folder on it.
cd /Volumes/MacHD/Macintosh\ HD
sudo mv * ..
I set the volume as the startup volume. ... The second time I booted up in verbose mode, and it states that the /dev directory was missing.
Chalk this up as one method that doesn't work.