Time Machine Backup external HD does not appear in Migration Assistant disk selection window.

Does anything show up? It should have a green or yellow icon, but will have the name of the Computer and drive that were backed-up, not the name of the backup drive.

If it really doesn't appear, try repairing the backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

And, are you sure you want to use Migration Assistant, instead of Setup Assistant? If not, see How do I set up a new Mac from my old Mac or its backups?

Did this work, Glenn? My iMac had a recall on the Seagate HD and now I have my new HD back today from the Apple store. Can't see either of my two BU drives although they are working fine from the Finder. The Migration Assistant is not showing either drive. I need to do a full restore from Time Machine. I am on 10.6.8.

To do a full system restore, you don't use Migration Assistant.

Instead, see Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14.

If the backups don't appear there, they may be damaged. Try to repair them, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

EDIT: It's late here, and I'm going to bed soon, but will be back online tomorrow.

Message was edited by: Pondini

Pondini,

I have a gentleman who has an interesting observation about how Time Machine selects and deletes files.

Could you help us out here?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4479273?tstart=90

The original thread here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4473782?tstart=150

Thanks in advance. 😀

Added a little info to the original thread.

I just went though this on mine and I had to plug my External Drive straight into my iMac for it to be seen by Migration Assistant.

I did a clean install of Mountain Lion (this is the first time for doing a clean install of an operating system since my original purchase of my MacBoo Pro four years ago) and so far I've been able to recover all of my files, pictues, apps and music, thanks to iCloud and using Finder to access my archived Time Machine backup. But I'm stuck on how to recover the emails that I had saved to my Mac. I have recovered all of the email saved on my email server accounts, but not the ones that I had saved to a local folder in Mail. My problem is similar to "trouble me's", except Migration Assistant does see my archived backup on the drive attached to my Time Capsule. But it gets stuck on "Connecting." I left Migration Assistant running for hours, yet the status never changes. Like I stated above, I can mount and search the archived backup using Finder and copy and paste the files I want recovered. Any suggestions on what I need to do to recover the emails saved in Mail to a local folder?

Even though it can be seen attached to TC, try plugging it straight into your Mac.

Tried connecting my USB drive directly to my laptop, but the drive doesn't show up in Finder nor Migration Assistant. However it does appear up in Disk Utility. While in Disk Utility I ran a verify disk check which was good and I ran it on both partitions. Again everything checked out good. Even stranger, is that when I plug this external drive into Time Capsule it shows up in Finder and Migration Assistant.