MacBook Not Booting After Time Machine Restore, What to Do?

You use Time Machine to restore your Mac after a factory reset, revert to an earlier macOS version after an upgrade, or boot up your new Mac, only to find that your Mac won't turn on. Here are the common scenarios you may encounter:

Whatever your situation is, if your Mac won't boot after Time Machine restores, just follow this post. It will help you fix the problem and enable your Mac to start up successfully.

Here are the solutions for fixing Mac that won't boot after Time Machine restore:

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Mac won't boot after Time Machine restores, try these fixes

Whether your Mac won't boot after Time Machine restores with a black or gray screen or the progress bar seems to be nearly completed but keeps in that state for hours after Time Machine restores, you can try the workarounds below. These ways can fix almost all cases of the Mac that won't boot after Time Machine restore.

Charge your Mac

Restoring your Mac from a Time Machine backup usually takes a long time. That will consume a lot of power. If your MacBook not booting after Time Machine restores with a black screen, you should consider if the battery is drained.

You can charge your MacBook Pro or Air preferably at least 15 minutes. Then, press the Touch ID (the power button) to check if MacBook can turn on.

Force restart your Mac

Commonly, the Time Machine restoration process takes hours. But it is abnormal if the Time Machine backup is not large or the Time Machine restore seems taking forever to complete.

To fix the stuck Time Machine restore that blocks your Mac from restarting, you can force restart your Mac. And a force restart may be also workable if your iMac is stuck on restart after importing a Time Machine backup.

Here's how:

Disconnect the unnecessary peripherals

Check if a USB hub connecting many devices is attached to your Mac. Or if you connect some other external devices to your Mac when using the Time Machine external hard drive to restore files. The multiple peripherals can drain the power or certain of them have glitches, causing your Mac won't boot after Time Machine restores.

So, you can try to disconnect all peripherals. Then, check whether your Mac can boot up or not.

Change the startup security settings

Perhaps, you choose Restore From Time Machine Backup in Recovery Mode to downgrade your Mac or revert to the previous state. So, the Mac not booting after the Time Machine restores issue may be caused by your limited startup preferences.

You can change the startup security settings in macOS Recovery Mode to let your Mac boot up from a Time Machine external hard drive.

Then, back to the macOS Utilities menu and re-choose Restore From Time Machine to let your Mac restore and boot from the external drive.

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Enter into Safe Mode

Your MacBook not booting after Time Machine restores with a black screen may also be due to certain login items' interference. These third-party programs always automatically launch when you log in.

To stop them from running when your Mac startup, you can boot into Safe Mode. Safe boot on a Mac can prevent third-party software from loading and at the same time, it checks and diagnoses the startup disk errors.

Boot an Intel-based Mac to Safe Mode:

Boot a Mac with Apple Silicon to Safe Mode:

After in Safe Mode, go to disable the startup items:

Then, restart your Mac to check if it can boot up successfully.

Reset NVRAM

NVRAM (nonvolatile random-access memory) is a small amount of memory on your Mac that retains the system setting information, such as screen resolution, boot device preferences, and more. It works to boost your Mac startup and performance.

Thus, you can reset NVRAM to get rid of the errors that make your Mac not boot after Time Machine restore. Note that manually resetting NVRAM only works on Intel Macs.

Reset SMC

SMC (System Management Controller) maintains low-level settings like power supply and battery management on Intel-based Macs. You can reset SMC to exclude whether the glitches in SMC lead to Time Machine restore taking forever and Mac not booting.

Check the startup disk in macOS Recovery Mode

If your Mac still can't boot up, run Disk Utility First Aid in macOS Recovery Mode to check and repair the tiny errors on the startup disk (or Macintosh HD or macOS volume).

After First Aid finishes checking, click the Apple menu > Restart to check if your Mac restarts normally.

Reinstall macOS

If your Mac still can't start up after running First Aid to check the startup volume, the Mac hard drive probably is corrupted. To make your Mac machine bootable, you have to erase your Mac hard drive and reinstall macOS in Recovery Mode.

But erasing your Mac will completely remove all data on it. If you have the necessary and irreplaceable files, you can run iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover data from your unbootable Mac first.

Then, go ahead to erase your Mac and reinstall macOS:

Contact Apple Support

If you go to this step, it indicates that your Mac probably has unknown errors or hardware issues, you can contact Apple Support for help. They will give comprehensive technical assistance to fix the Mac that won't boot after Time Machine restores.

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