Migration Assistant Can't Find Time Machine Backup

[Makanmata]

Along with my hard drive crash has come the moment of truth for my Time Machine backup -- but I am having serious problems getting my backup to migrate from the LaCie backup to my brand new and reformatted local hard drive, using OSX10.6. The backups were made using 10.6 as well, and the LaCie drive contains nothing but Time Machine data, though also has a small empty Windows partition.

When I open Migration Assistant, and check to migrate from a TA backup and click continue, it finds no TA backups on my LaCie drive. When I look on Finder, I see that all of the data is there -- with the exception of the very last backup which was running when my hard drive gave out. All previous backups seem complete.

One clue for what might be going wrong is that the guy at the Genius Bar created a new User "Apple" on the reformatted and repaired machine to demonstrate something to me. When the LaCie was connected when logged on as "Apple", my Time Machine backups' volume names were all changed from my user name (i.e. "JohnSmith's iMac" to "Apple's iMac." Now I have recreated my User Johnsmith on my computer, but the LaCie still says that the backups that exist on the LaCie are for "Apple's iMac." [For clarification, the folders are "Backups.backupdp" and "apple's iMac" and then folders with the date of the backup].

I tried to manually drag stuff over and avoid migration assistant, but I am having nothing but problems with the permissions which won't let me access the data, and "repair permissions" is not helping. Can anybody offer any advice? Might upgrading the OS to Lion solve this problem?

Thanks.

 

[JediMeister]

My understanding is that if you set up exclusions, i.e. designated folders you do not want Time Machine to backup, you cannot migrate from that backup. You can only migrate from backups that have not had any exclusions set, i.e. that are backing up the entire system unrestricted.

 

[Makanmata]

Nope, no exclusions or anything like that. I used the drive exclusively for Time Machine too. Spent about 7 hours yesterday manually transferring everything over as a "root" user. Not too easy, but at least I've got most everything back on the new hard drive.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

My understanding is that if you set up exclusions, i.e. designated folders you do not want Time Machine to backup, you cannot migrate from that backup. You can only migrate from backups that have not had any exclusions set, i.e. that are backing up the entire system unrestricted.

I find that hard to believe Jedi, for a start, if something is excluded,when you come to restore the TM backup, there is no record of that exclusion as its not there, so how could that effect anything? Secondly it would be a nonsensical restriction.

Got any documentation for that?