Install OS X from recovery partition fails

[cbr900rr]

I have a Late 2015 MacBook Pro running Sierra 10.12.4 running VMWare Fusion Pro 8.5.6.

I am attempting to Install OS X from recovery partition and restore a time machine backup.

Here are the different methods I have tried which fail.

Process Number One

——————————

1. File | New | Install OS X from the recovery partition.  This gives you a small default drive with a partition which boots where you can then Recovery from Time machine.
2. I made the disk larger in the Fusion settings and repartitioned / reformatted it to 520G.
3. I recovered the time machine backup

I recovered the Time Machine backup successfully

The problem - when the restore completes it boots back to the recovery options/partition where you began.

Process Number Two

——————————

1. In addition to the small partition created by default, I added a send drive of 520G.
2. I recovered the Time Machine backup successfully

Again the VM just boots back to the initial recovery partition where you begin.

[bluefirestorm]

I don't have a direct solution to the install from recovery partition problem you described.

An alternative is to download macOS Sierra from the App Store (10.2.5 download is around 4.96GB in size) and create a VM and install from the downloaded macOS Sierra. I have installed OSX/macOS VMs successfully a few times in the past using this method.

Keep in mind that there is a limit of 5 computers per Apple ID. So if you had signed in with the Apple ID (even from a VM) with those two attempts in installing VMs, this gets registered and counts towards the 5 computer limit.

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT204074

The macOS EULA also limits to 2 VMs per licenced macOS. I don't know if Apple enforces this through the Apple ID or lets you hit the 5 count even if you have only one macOS licence.

http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1012.pdf#page=2&zoom=auto,-265,733

[ColoradoMarmot]

Agreed, the install from the download is the best option.

For future attempts, the OP doesn't have to sign in at all to install OSX, just hit skip.   Once it's up and stable, then sign in if desired.

[cbr900rr]

Perhaps you are not able to do a bare metal restore into the VM.  I was able to do a migration and point to the Time Machine backup and

that worked on the second try.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Correct, bare metal restores won't work.  Migration will.

I'd suggest migrating from a clone rather than time machine.  The latter is notorious for silent corruption.

[vmxmr]

Off topic, just sharing:

I keep two types of backups.

One backup type is Time Machine. In general, I use it to recover edited files from yesterday, stuff like that. It can serve as a full backup/restore, but like dlhotka​, I don't expect it to work. I have had mixed results when trying full restores using Time Machine. What I like about Time Machine is that it is passive. It runs the backups without direct action from me.

The other backup type is currently a matched set of three drives, 6 Tbytes each. One is the Master, the others are Backup 1 and Backup 2. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a full disk image of a given Mac. We have several in the house, so the drives are very large to hold disk images for multiple Macs. Whenever I am ready for a swap, I use CCC to clone Master to one of the backup drives, and then swap it for the other backup drive with a family member. The family member stores that offsite backup, which should cover us after a natural disaster.

We have a headless Mac mini which serves as the family server. Among the many things it does is handle the cloning and copying for backups. Just launch the copy (or clone) operation and let it run until it is done.