MacBook – Time Machine Restore Button Greyed Out For External Hard Drive

backuphard drivemacbook prorestoretime-machine

I recently brought my computer (Mid 2010 Macbook pro) into the Apple Store because it had been crashing recently. The first time I brought it in, they did a clean wipe of the hard drive and restored it back to 10.9 Mavericks. When I restarted the computer, I chose not to perform a restore from Time Machine.

Upon dragging a file to the desktop from the external hard drive, the laptop crashed again. I brought it back to the Apple Store and had the logic board replaced. After I got it back, I decided to try upgrading to Yosemite, and then perform a restore from Time Machine on to my computer.

However, when I go into the Time Machine timeline and select the folder I want restored (it's something like Backups.backupdb > Christine's MacBook Pro > 2014-10-10-235138)), the 'restore' option is greyed out. Additionally, the timeline only allows me to perform restores from as far back as today (10/26/14).

To restore all my files back to their normal places, am I doing something wrong? Or do I need to downgrade to Mavericks and restore from Time Machine? Any help is appreciated!

I'm currently running OS X Yosemite (10.10).

Best Answer

Guess I needed to boot while pressing command + R and choose to restore from my hard drive. Though it will down grade me to Mavericks.