restoring Mac os X to new MBP with Lion

[Sonhascome]

Ok, this might be a dumb question but I can't figure it out. I had lion on a previous laptop, and just purchased a new macbook pro. The first time that I turned it on I plugged up the external hard drive which I used as time machine, I was hoping to just restore the old os x and be good to go. However, on the startup screen it wouldn't find my external hard drive, so I decided to go ahead and turn it on and try it with migration assistant, and migration assistant won't find my hard drive either! I can access it from the "Finder" window, but the computer doesn't seem to see it any other way. Any help would be appreciated, thanks

 

[newfoundglory]

Usually, you restore a Time Machine backup using the Mac OS X installer.

With Lion this means booting into the Recovery HD (hold down the alt/option key on startup and select the recovery HD)

When in recovery, there will be a choice to restore from a TM backup.

 

[Sonhascome]

I went and used the time machine with my old computer on a different hard drive and then plugged that into my new computer and that did the trick. I'm not really sure what was wrong because my new computer will read the hard drive that I first attempted this with now, but it wouldn't read it when I was trying to restore from time machine.