How to restore a .sparseimage backup from Windows to Mac over network?

[aschwabe]

I'm doing a restore for the first time and the user guide doesn't seem too clear on this. I have a .sparseimage file of my entire hard disk located on a Windows machine's backup.

I'm thinking that the easiest way to do this is to partition the Mac in half, copy the .sparseimage onto one partition, and boot into disk utility and restore it onto the other partition. Is that the best way?

Thanks in advance.

[dnanian]

So, it's only available networked from the Windows machine? Do you have any drive you could copy the image to?

[aschwabe]

No I don't have an external drive. I managed to get my .sparseimage restored to one partition on my Mac, but now I'm faced with the problem of the extra partition on my Mac and no way to get rid of it without destroying my OS X install too.

Any ideas? I tried to restore directly from the Windows SMB share, but couldn't find a way to mount the share through disk utility (booted from OS X install DVD).

[dnanian]

Yes, while you can get to the network, I don't believe the startup drive has SMB support.

iPartition (or SubRosaSoft's equivalent) can be used to remove the extra partition without losing the data...

[aschwabe]

Right, I've tried both of those. Problem with most Mac partitioning software is that very few support the new Intel Mac's GUID partition table format (different from PPC-based Macs). The only one that supports it that I've seen thus far is iPartition, but it costs quite a bit to buy :(

[dnanian]

Well, my suggest would be to invest in that or a device you can put your backup on... I think that's likely to be the best solution...