# time machine won't restore from back-up



## stingrayj (Jan 3, 2014)

My HD crashed today, the third in four years  


My day started with a grey OS Utilities screen. I'm running 10.91 on an imac, booted from an external drive (well until it crashed)

Ok the good news is I have Time Machine back-up (and it last did so last night). I can view my files and folders and access them if I plug Time Machine HD into my ibook. So they are there.


When I go into 'Restore from Time Machine Back up)  I can access the Time Machine HD ok. But then when I go onto next page (Select a Back Up) the 'Restore From' option only has the greyed out name of my crashed HD (this seems wrong?). If I continue the process to erase starts and then stops, message says:

An error occurred while adding a recovery system to the destination disk. 


Help!


All help very much appreciated, and Happy New Year to all

Iain


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## Cheryl (Jan 4, 2014)

That&#8217;s a good indication that the hard drive (destination disk) you are running the iMac with has failed. 
10.9 has a different way to recover and use the Disk Utility. 
Apple Support
OS X Recovery includes a built in set of utilities as part of the Recovery System. To start your computer from Recovery, restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R). Press and hold these keys until the Apple logo appears. This indicates that your Mac is starting up. After the Recovery System finishes starting up, you should see a desktop with an OS X menu bar and a "Mac OS X Utilities" window.


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## stingrayj (Jan 4, 2014)

HI Cheryl


many thanks for yr advise. Perhaps I sd have made it a bit clearer: i have the Utlities screen but it's the Time Machine back up which I'm unable to restore due to the procedure I explained above

Iain 




Cheryl said:


> Thats a good indication that the hard drive (destination disk) you are running the iMac with has failed.
> 10.9 has a different way to recover and use the Disk Utility.
> Apple Support
> OS X Recovery includes a built in set of utilities as part of the Recovery System. To start your computer from Recovery, restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R). Press and hold these keys until the Apple logo appears. This indicates that your Mac is starting up. After the Recovery System finishes starting up, you should see a desktop with an OS X menu bar and a "Mac OS X Utilities" window.


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## Cheryl (Jan 5, 2014)

Okay, let&#8217;s see if I got this right. You are trying to restore your HD using Time Machine. But when you get to the point of selecting the drive to restore from and to, your selections are greyed out. 
Did you run Disk Utility first, to verify the drives? This is important to make sure your drives are running smoothly. If your drive is not working, you will have problems.
Here&#8217;s a site that gives a better step by step. Restore from Time Machine


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