Migration assistant not seeing backups

I'm having the same issue I believe. When I upgraded to Mavericks, my internal SSD was corrupted during the process and I was stuck in a boot-loop. After much trouble, I finally got a clean install of Mavericks on my internal drive, then the Migration Assistant failed to recognize any sources to restore from. I can see all the contents of the drive fine without issue in Finder.

I think I have this solved. I had to enable the root account and delete the backups that mavericks made. Then Start migration assistant and use root and the root password to start it. I was then finally able to see the time machine in migration assistant. If you enabled time machine in mavericks it only shows the last backup made. Hence why you want to remove the ones after the upgrade. I'll reply again in a few hours once the transfer completes on if it was successful.

FYI - The transfer was successful.

I am having the same problem but do not know how to enable the root account. Would anyone be able to post instructions? Sorry. I am over 40 and doing my best.

Enabling and disabling the root account can be found here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14281

As a general practice you wouldn't want to leave the root account enabled.

Same solution as QuinnB73: When I started Time Machine first time after:

- failed migration to Mavericks

- disk format

- reinstallation of 10.6.8 and succesful ugrade to Mavericks

with the external backup disk connected - Time Machine created a "new" backup. This backup was obviously empty, i.e. only containing Mavericks but no user data. Consequently Migration assistant would find no data to migrate.

Solution was to go to Backups.backupdb on the external disk (in Finder) and manually delete the backups created after the migration to Mavericks. Now the Migration assistant saw the backup I created just before the initial failed migration to Mavericks and could succesfully migrate all my data.

I guess you should be VERY careful with what you do manually on the backup disk, but I was out of options and the advice from the local shop worked.

You may want to try booting via installation disk (DVD) so that you can get to the Mac OS X Installer. Then choose Utilities -> Restore System From Backup. This worked for me. I was able to see all the backups on my Time Machine drive. However, it still didn't show me any data inside my backups. So I just mounted the TM sparsebundle, navigated into the appropriate folders and manually copied files - see: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_manually_restore_time_machine