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I just bought a new Macbook Air after giving mine to my wife. Before gifting the old laptop I created a Time Machine backup.

Now that I have my new MBAir, I went into Apple+R and chose to restore a Time Machine Backup. Chose my backup, chose the Macintosh HD as the destination drive. It failed.

Now, subsequent attempts have not shown Macintosh HD as a choice for restoration destination. It is also not a choice when trying to choose a start up disk.

However it does show up in Disk Utility.

Boot attempts without holding Apple+R take me to the same OSX Utilities Page.

It seems that I lost my Macintosh HD....

What should I do?

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  • You'll have to do an Internet Recovery now, then do what you should have in the first place - Migrate. You'll be given the opportunity at the 'set up a new machine' introduction. – Tetsujin Jul 9 '15 at 18:04
  • I am not able to choose the Macintosh HD as the destination for the recovery. – Roberto Jul 9 '15 at 18:17
  • Format it in Disk Utility - GUID, HFS Extended, Journaled. Don't mess about with Recovery from Time Machine to dissimilar hardware, that's not what it was made for. Use Migrate. – Tetsujin Jul 9 '15 at 18:26
  • It does not give me the option to format the Macintosh HD, only to format the recovery partition. @Tetsujin the only place that i can even see ANY mention of Macintosh HD is in Disk Utility. Other than that i would wonder if it was even attached any more. I am ready to do ANYTHING. the computer is brand new, i risk no information loss. I will start from Absolute zero. Suggestions? – Roberto Jul 10 '15 at 2:49
  • At this point I'd be making an appointment at the Genius Bar. I'm not sure what else, if you can't even see the drive to format/install. Take the Time Machine with you & tell them what you did, what happened. They'll likely do the migrate for you as well. They're nice like that. Wish you luck :) – Tetsujin Jul 10 '15 at 5:47
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Depending on how old the original MBA is compared to the new one, you probably won't be able to do a bare metal restore.

What you can do, is do a fresh OS install (if not done already) and "Migrate Your Settings" from the Time Machine Backup.

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