The short version is this. Wife's MBA died an unnatural death involving liquid spill. Her MBA had been making regular TM backups to our time capsule.
Made decision not to repair wife's MBA and instead to give her my MBA expecting to wipe my MBA clean, reinstall operating system and restore wife's TM back up to the machine expecting it would put her right back where she was.
Tried to erase data on my MBA using disc utility - think I succeeded but it wasn't 100% clear specifically what to do. Reinstalled operating system - mountain lion. Ran through set up but when I came to the request to restore from a computer or time machine back up I ran into trouble. The computer is seeing my time capsule fine and the "DATA" folder where the sparsebundle backups for her old MBA is there but when I say yes I want to load use that location for the restore it says it is connecting but never connects. I am able to see the sparsebundle backups for all our computers, including her old MBA are present and they show the appropriate size etc.
This leaves me in a bad place - can't restore my wife's data which is priceless. I know the TC is working because other computers are connecting fine and making TM backups in the normal manner. But I can't seem to get this newly set up machine to make the necessary connection so that I can then find the correct TM back up from my wife's old MBA and restore. If I look in finder I do see the sparsebundle file with her name on it sitting there.
I went back and reinstalled the OS again on my old MBA but still no joy either on initial set up or running migration assistant. However, this time I was only able to install Lion, not mountain lion for some reason. So right now it has Lion - the computer had Lion originally and was upgrade sometime back to Mountain Lion. Maybe I downloaded too many times?
Can anyone offer any help/suggestions? Any ideas will be much appreciated.
EDIT - I should add that my old MBA is able to see the TC and the folder and sparsebundle files in finder just fine. Problem is it wont connect when running migration assistant.
EDIT 2 - I notice that when I look at my old MBA with Disc Utility I see "251 GB Apple SSD SM25..." at the top and then underneath that another image with "Untitled" as the name. On the other hand - when I look at my new Retina with disc utility to compare I see "Macintosh HD" listed as the name of the second listed item. No clue if I may have messed up when I tried to wipe out the MBA old data before reinstalling the OS.
Made decision not to repair wife's MBA and instead to give her my MBA expecting to wipe my MBA clean, reinstall operating system and restore wife's TM back up to the machine expecting it would put her right back where she was.
Tried to erase data on my MBA using disc utility - think I succeeded but it wasn't 100% clear specifically what to do. Reinstalled operating system - mountain lion. Ran through set up but when I came to the request to restore from a computer or time machine back up I ran into trouble. The computer is seeing my time capsule fine and the "DATA" folder where the sparsebundle backups for her old MBA is there but when I say yes I want to load use that location for the restore it says it is connecting but never connects. I am able to see the sparsebundle backups for all our computers, including her old MBA are present and they show the appropriate size etc.
This leaves me in a bad place - can't restore my wife's data which is priceless. I know the TC is working because other computers are connecting fine and making TM backups in the normal manner. But I can't seem to get this newly set up machine to make the necessary connection so that I can then find the correct TM back up from my wife's old MBA and restore. If I look in finder I do see the sparsebundle file with her name on it sitting there.
I went back and reinstalled the OS again on my old MBA but still no joy either on initial set up or running migration assistant. However, this time I was only able to install Lion, not mountain lion for some reason. So right now it has Lion - the computer had Lion originally and was upgrade sometime back to Mountain Lion. Maybe I downloaded too many times?
Can anyone offer any help/suggestions? Any ideas will be much appreciated.
EDIT - I should add that my old MBA is able to see the TC and the folder and sparsebundle files in finder just fine. Problem is it wont connect when running migration assistant.
EDIT 2 - I notice that when I look at my old MBA with Disc Utility I see "251 GB Apple SSD SM25..." at the top and then underneath that another image with "Untitled" as the name. On the other hand - when I look at my new Retina with disc utility to compare I see "Macintosh HD" listed as the name of the second listed item. No clue if I may have messed up when I tried to wipe out the MBA old data before reinstalling the OS.