MacOS – Time Machine cannot locate external disk

macostime-machine

I have an iMac11,2 running MacOS 10.8.5. Time Machine (TM) has made backup on a LaCie 320GB Firewire400 HDD for almost 2 years now. It stopped working 2 weeks ago, stuck on 'looking for drive'. My HDD is full, but I am quite sure it already deleted older backups successfully. I tried:

  • to connect a new external HDD (Seagate 2TB with USB cover) and switch TM to this, formatted in MacOS extended,journalized (no encryption);
  • to turn off TM, delete /System/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, turn on TM, reselect my disk; once again rebooting before turning on TM;
  • entered StarWars mode, copied com.apple.TimeMachine.plist from my last working backup to my internal HDD;
  • copied Backups.backupdb from the 320GB to the 2TB disk; I can enter StarWars mode and browse, but still the infinite 'looking for drive' message
  • checked the drive permissions: 320GB's Backups.backupdb is drwxr-xr-x+ root:staff. 2TB is similar due to the copy. I am currently changing the 2TB's Backups.backupdb persmissions to drwxrwxr-x+ root:staff recursively, but it takes some time, I will post the result later. Took the night to do that, still no luck.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Eventually upgraded from 10.8 to 10.10 (Apple having removed 10.9 from AppStore...). And Time Machine is now up and running. I'll never know what happened.

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