Problem after Time Machine restore - Mojave 10.14

[ebmaurer]

I have Mojave 10.14 and used TM which did always the backup without any errors.

Now, after replacing my SSD, I formatted it to Mac OS Extended in Recovery Utilities (didn’t give me the option to format to APFS) and proceeded to restore the backup (720GB).
All good here, took almost 5 hours.
Restarted fine but then it’s stuck at the Apple logo screen with a full progress bar and won’t come to the login screen.

Under Verbose mode it’s repeating an error as in the photo.

Anybody has a solution?

Thanks

 

[madrich]

I cannot tell you how to fix the problem you posted, but I believe the TM views your computer as a new PC, and probably should have used the migration assistant; instead of doing a restore.

 

[Fishrrman]

It sure helps if you tell us
- which Mac you have
- what year it was made
- what kind of drive is inside

 

[ebmaurer]

It’s a MacBook Pro 9,2 (mid 2012)
Samsung EVO 860 1TB

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:
You wrote:
I formatted it to Mac OS Extended in Recovery Utilities (didn’t give me the option to format to APFS)

Did you do this from the recovery partition (command-R at boot)
or
Did you do this from INTERNET recovery? (command-OPTION-R at boot)

Even though I'm a fan of HFS+, it would seem to me that you should be able to initialize/erase the drive for APFS.

But I believe you would need to be booted to INTERNET recovery to do this (NOT from the recovery partition).

Actually, since you swapped the drive, do you still have the old drive nearby, untouched?

You don't even have to bother with restore.

If you have the original drive in-hand, there's a much better way.

 

[Arakun]

I've struggled with the exact same issue. I recently got a new computer and decided to upgrade my old iMac with an SSD. Since I had a Time Machine backup I thought the easiest way was to boot into Internet Recovery, format the SSD and do a "Restore from Time Machine Backup". This resulted in an error message telling me that "a recovery system can't be created".

My next attempt was to reinstall Mac OS, which also creates a Recovery System. This time I was able to restore from Time Machine from Recovery mode (which took about 20 hours). However, I then got the exact same problem as OP: the progress bar stuck at 100% and the same repeating errors in verbose mode.

The third attempt was to get a SATA-to-USB adapter and try to use the Disk Utility restore feature to copy everything over from the HDD to the SSD. That didn't work and resulted in an immediate error message. No big surprise since the computer was running Mountain Lion and the HDD was formatted with APFS.

I found a few different forum post saying to use Migration Assistant instead. So I reinstalled Mac OS again, upgraded it to the same version as the backup (Mojave) just to be safe and then ran Migration Assistant to restore from Time Machine. It took another 20 hours but worked like a charm. Everything seems to be just as I left it!

TL;DR: Reinstall Mac OS and then run Migration Assistant!

 

[madrich]

I am glad you finally resolved the TM problem. My recommendation came from memory of TM site called Pondini. James 'Pondini' Pond created a Time Machine support FAQ site. Sadly he passed away in 2013 and his site is no longer active, but an internet search you may find someone that backed up his TM instructions. They were quite thorough; albeit now they would be somewhat obsoleted due to new OSXs.

 

[Weaselboy]

but an internet search you may find someone that backed up his TM instructions.

http://oldtoad.net/pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

Here you go. His site was a great resource.