Comments on: Logic Board replacement and Time Machine

By: mcg

mcg — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:08:15 +0000

Hey folks,
I’ve successfully used this trick in the past. I needed to do so again today—or so I thought—so I found your web site via Google. Well, it turns out that Snow Leopard has apparently fixed this issue for us! If it detects that the Time Machine volume was used on a different computer, it will ask if you want to re-use it (yes, you do!) or create a new one.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:46:13 +0000

Thanks, this worked for me. One note, however, instead of “My Computer” which shows up on my desktop as “Macintosh HD” Time Machine uses my username “Kyle XXXXXX (MBP17)”. Other folks might have figured this out no problem, but just a heads up.

Kyle.

By: mud

mud — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:28:34 +0000

@john

You’re right. Updated the post. Thanks!

-Tak.

By: John Grant

John Grant — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:23:06 +0000

Hi Guys,

A couple of comments.

One try using tab key to auto-hint/auto-resolve your paths, also in terminal you can not use names with spaces for paths, so either comment out spaces with \ or enclose the whole path in quotation marks:

eg.1: foobar$ cd /Volumes/My\ Backup\ Drive/Backups.backupdb/

eg.2: foobar$ cd “/Volumes/My Backup Drive/Backups.backupdb/”

Also there is a mistake in the above instructions. At **

$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive -d
$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive
$ sudo mv .aabbccddeeff .001122334455

** Change to the Backups.backupdb folder first or include the whole path in the next command.

$ sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:11:22:33:44:55 “My Computer”
$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive -e

Great article otherwise BuzaMoto!

John.

By: Sachit

Sachit — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:19:09 +0000

I get the following output, nothing with the old MAC address:

drwxr-xr-x 8 Sachit staff 476 Dec 21 2008 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 6 root admin 204 Jan 12 20:40 ..
-rw-r–r–@ 1 Sachit staff 6148 Jan 12 19:55 .DS_Store
drwx—— 3 root staff 102 Apr 8 2008 .Spotlight-V100
drwxrwxrwt@ 3 Sachit staff 102 Apr 17 2008 .TemporaryItems
d-wx-wx-wt 3 Sachit staff 102 Jan 12 20:40 .Trashes
-rw-r–r– 1 root staff 0 Apr 8 2008 .com.apple.timemachine.supported
drwx—— 2 Sachit staff 4522 Jan 12 20:40 .fseventsd
drwxr-xr-x 3 root staff 102 Apr 8 2008 Backups.backupdb
drwxrwxrwt 3 root admin 238 Jan 12 19:58 lost+found

btw you can also get the old mac address from the sparsebundle image name in the end
old one was 001f5bf1441c and new one is 001ec2c1adde

any help would be greatly appreciated

By: Cliff

Cliff — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:28:06 +0000

Thanks for the writeup. I was able to get it to work, with a minor change. (For those having problems with spaces in path names – double quote the whole path or backslash each of the spaces.) In my case it would not recognize my computer name, even if I cut and pasted it from the filesystem into double quotes. However, I was able to simply wildcard the computer name with an asterisk (*), and since I only have one system name in the folder, it worked. I did need to cd back into the Backups.backupdb folder before the 2nd-to-last step, and wildcard it there as well.

But I now have a working Time Machine again, it did not need to back up the whole system (the “preparing” finished after about 10-12 minutes), and I can browse through 18 months worth of previous backups.

By: Robin

Robin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:49:56 +0000

Cheers for your efforts but I can’t get passed the first step :S

cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive/Backups.backupdb
for me is:
cd /Volumes/Backup HD/Backups.backupdb

I enter this into terminal and get ‘no such file or directory’ in response
I’ve got the external hard drive attached and can’t think of any stupid mistakes i’m making.

Any help?

By: mud

mud — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:31:29 +0000

Something might have changed with how Timemachine keeps track of volumes, but you should still be able to see your old MAC address by:

cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive ls -la

The file that looks like .XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (eg. .1a2b3c4d5e6f) will imply that your MAC address is 1a::2b::3c::4d::5e::6f

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:14:46 +0000

Okay, so I’ve tried many variants of this and cannot get it to “spit out” my old MAC address. One concern I have is that I have two computers backed up to this hard drive. Perhaps I need to change the syntax to get it to show me the one I want…? Right now, the xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress command just returns the $ cursor. Help!

By: nick

nick — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:46:06 +0000

Hi – just got my MBP back, also with a new logic board, and have the same issue. however i’m stuck on the first step. i can cd to the backupdb just fine but when i try to run:

$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress

nothing happens. i should be seeing the mac address, right?

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!
n