Migration Assistant - recovering data from a sparse bundle

My 2011 13" Macbook Pro (running Snow Leopard) has been accidentally damaged to the point where it won't boot up. I'll get it repaired but needed a replacement that day so I went to the nearest Apple Store and bought a new machine running Mountain Lion.

I ran Migration Assistant and it's done a good job of moving apps and accounts but no data in iCal, Mail, iTunes, etc.

I took the hard drive out of the old machine and copied the sparse bundle onto the new machine. The thing is the old machine was encrypted with Snow Leopard's Filevault. I can mount the sparse bundle drive on my new Macbook by typing the password.

This gives me access to my old files but when I rerun Migration Assistant it cannot see the sparse bundle drive so won't give me the option of restoring from it, even though the drive is mounted. Is that because it's encrypted?

Just to clarify, the sparse bundle is from the old machine encrypted by filevault. It is NOT a Time Machine backup. I do have a Time Machine backup but I'm on vacation so won't have access to it for 2 weeks.

I've Googled for several hours but cannot find the answer. Does anyone know the answer of how I can get Migration Assistant to see the sparse bundle once I've typed in the password and mounted the drive?

 

Wow my first post and it stumped the collective knowledge of MacRumours. It seems moving from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion isn't that easy.

After a week of usage I think Snow Leopard is a better operating system too. Mountain Lion's snooze feature in Calendar, for example, is a jaw-dropping gaffe. It seems it's not possible to move back to Snow Leopard which is a shame.

 

Mal - thanks I'm going to give that a try.

Rhoydotp - I can't be the only person to have tried this. Apple are pretty lousy in this area. They give you the functionality to encrypt your user then miss out that user in time machine backups or restorations from sparsebundles. In both cases there is no notification of this so someone who didn't know better might have been using Time Machine for years thinking their files were backed up only to find them missing when they needed to restore.

That isn't the case for me but there's probably lots of people out there in that boat.

Anyway I've manually restored most of my stuff but I'll try Mal's suggestion for the rest.

Apple should shape up in this area and stop wasting their time trying to make OSX look like a giant iPhone.

As for the Calendar problem, how that could have got past testing is unbelievable. I'm probably going to end up buying a third party Calendar app.

 

I've just installed Mozilla Lightning in order to get a working snooze function. It sure doesn't look as good as Apple's Calendar but at least it works. I'll stick with Mozilla.

How does Thunderbird compare with Apple Mail? I might try that too as I'm not impressed with Mountain Lion and the IOS direction in general.

6 years ago I was still on Windows and bit by bit I moved away from Microsoft by switching from their apps to third party ones. It's funny that now I'm beginning to do that with Apple. I never thought I would.

OSX is great but Apple need to get back on the case with their quality control.