Time Machine Restore: “Connect to Remote Disk” Grayed Out

My MacBook Pro’s drive gave up the ghost. AppleCare covered it, and now I’m restoring from its most recent Time Machine backup.

I backup to a shared volume, so imagine my surprise when, after starting up from the Leopard DVD, the “Connect to Remote Disk” button was grayed out! There appears to be no nice way to restore from a networked drive from the Leopard DVD.

Not to worry though. I found an Apple support thread on the subject, which offered two solutions:

• Mount the networked volume via the Terminal
• Plug the shared drive directly into the laptop

I tried the second option, which seems to be working. It appears that even though shared drives use sparse disk images for Time Machine, while local drives are used directly, Leopard will restore from a local drive with sparse disk images on it.