Migration Assistant help with new 15" rMBP.

[Lifequest]

I'm trying to migrate information from my MBA 13" 10.8.2 to my 15" rMBP.
Method: Time Machine backup with external HD. HD is new and formatted for Mac Journaled.

Attempts so far:
1. Back up from welcome, assistant unable to find my HD. I proceeded to install without migrating.
2. Opened migration assistant when logged into my rMBP. Still unable to locate my external hard drive. The HD is visible in finder.
3. Upgraded rMBP to 10.8.2 to be consistent with my MBA 10.8.2. Still unable to locate external HD in migration assistant. Keeps on searching/spinning.
4. Booted into recovery mode. From there "Restore from Time Machine back up". HD finally shows up. I selected my backup partition and it says there are "No Available OS X Back Up".

Odd. So I reconnected my HD to my MBA and did a clean backup, took 2 hours.

5. Same as attempt 4. Recovery mode. Again, No Available OS X Back Up.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I'm wondering why Migration Assistant can't find my hard drive and it can only find it when in recovery mode. Yet, in recovery mode, I get an error stating that no OS X Back Ups were found.

If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

 

[wabbit42]

Try hooking up the two computers together with an ethernet lead to try and use migration assistant that way.

 

[Lifequest]

My MBA does not have an ethernet port.

 

[wabbit42]

My MBA does not have an ethernet port.

Ha, whoops . How about wifi? Might be slow but could work. LAst option if nothing works I suppose is the manual method by just moving everything yourself.

But someone else will probably have a better idea!

 

[Lifequest]

Haha. Thanks though.
I'll try the wifi thing before I go to bed and leave it overnight. It'll take a few hours.
I will still be bothered by the time machine thing though. What if my HD failed and I am unable to restore from the TM backup, that would be useless.

 

[Lifequest]

I tried Wifi, estimated 80-100 hours.


Back to the HD option. I've seen other says USB 3 only takes them about 1-2 hours.
I don't understand why migration assistant is not seeing my time machine backup. Finder can see the hard drive fine.

 

[Weaselboy]

I tried Wifi, estimated 80-100 hours.


Back to the HD option. I've seen other says USB 3 only takes them about 1-2 hours.
I don't understand why migration assistant is not seeing my time machine backup. Finder can see the hard drive fine.

That should work. It sounds like something is up with your backup.

Let's backup a bit (bad pun). Exactly what kind of external HD and connection type are you using? Is it a regular external USB drive connected directly to the MBA? When you say you did a "clean backup", did you reformat the external again to Mac OS Extended?