Time Machine has no system to restore!

[ooblio]

First time on the board, but I'm frantic. My wife's macbook air (late 2008) had it's hard drive die for the 2nd time in two years, but at least after the first one, I bought the 750GB time capsule/time machine, so we've been backing up hourly ever since. I've had my hard drive die since then, and the restore was flawless.

But this time, we brought the computer back home after the hard drive was replaced, rebooted with the snowleopard disk, and restored. The new hard drive then died after the restore, but before the next backup could start. The mac dealer who replaced the drive said they'd replace the drive at no charge.

But when I got the MBA home, started to restore the system, and it tells me there are no OSX systems to restore! A look around the web for advice discovered a factoid that says as soon as you restore, all the backups are made unavailable, and so be sure to back up again right away.

See the problem? I still need to restore from the last backup, but time machine doesn't acknowledge them. If I use finder from my iMac to look at the time machine disk, I can still see directories and subdirectories that look like the last backups of the MBA's drive.

How can I restore if I can't restore!?? Please help.

Thanks,
Dave in Calgary

 

[Brian33]

I think there's some info on this page that might help you: I can't see some backups

For example:

"Time Machine keeps the backups for each Mac separate, and normally only shows the ones for the Mac it's running on, even if there are other Macs' backups on the same disk/partition.

Also, sometimes Time Machine will start a new "sequence" of backups, as if they were from a different Mac.

To see these "other" backups, you need the (badly named) Browse Other Time Machine Disks option. It's available by Option-clicking the Time Machine icon in your Menubar, or by right-clicking the Time Machine icon in your Dock."

and:

"If the backups you want were made over a network, you may have to manually mount the sparse bundle they're in, by double-clicking it via the Finder, for them to show up in the selection screen. See the pink box below."

Regards,
Brian33