Can't find .ics files on my HD

Try searching for your ics files using the Finder/File/Find command. That seems to work better for me than Spotlight. Not sure why, but it seems to consistently find files that Spotlight doesn't.

When I searched using Spotlight I found a few ics files in my downloads folder (likely because they were invites that I received via email). When I used Finder to do the search I found many more, including several in the library/applicationsupport/ical file.

Swisscarl,

Look for folders named something like 4A1DC586-14EC-4D42-B659-BEBA31968385.calendar in the Macintosh HD/Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/iCal/Sources Folder of your external drive. There will be as many of these folders as you had calendars on the previous system, but they will have different alpha numeric names on your computer than the example which I gave you.

Open these oddly named folders and you will find the corestorage.ics files containing your former calendars.

Use iCal to import the corestorage files by using the iCal>File>Import... menu command to navigate to and import the appropriate corestorage.ics file for each of your calendars.

;~)