Migration assistant can't find external hard drive

Ah, ok. Very odd. 😟

It's not normally recommended, but try a full system restore from those backups, per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

That will warn you not to restore backups from a different Mac, but you've tried everything else.

When it's done, your Mac may not start up; if it does, it will likely kernel panic or not work well.

Just install a fresh copy of OSX from the USB stick that came with your Air (that won't disturb anything else).

Then it should be ok.

No, neither one.

Your OSX partition is formatted properly, and you're not trying to transfer a second HD.

That sounds like one of two things:

Either you excluded System files (and perhaps Applications) from being backed-up;

or, no backup completed -- either failed or was cancelled.

Possible?

Well, that's the downside. 😟 You can't do a full system restore if you didn't back up your full system.

And apparently Migration Assistant and Setup Assistant don't recognize it, either, so, you're in a bit of a pickle.

You'll have to restore it "piecemeal," via the Star Wars display.

How many user accounts did you have on your old Mac, and how many do you have now? We've got to get around the permissions issues you saw when using the Star Wars display earlier.

(It's late here, and I'll be going to bed soon; if you don't post back fairly soon, I'll be snoozing, but will be back tomorrow.)

franz1 wrote:

Guess Apple needs to change that from "It will save space" to "It will save space but make your backup completely useless"

Yeah, I've tried to get them to do that several times.

Add your voice here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html

I only had one account on the old Mac. I was the administrator and only user. On the new Air, I have two.

Aha! Try the "Star Wars" display with both. One of them (probably the first one you set up) should be able to see inside the backups of the home folder without the no-access icons.

Then you can restore things, but it will be quite tedious. 😟 You can't just select the old home folder, or even the default sub-folders (Desktop, Downloads, Documents, etc.), and restore them, because the ones that already exist on your new Mac are protected.

For most folders, you'll have to select all the folders inside those default sub-folders. That's probably easiest to do if you set the Finder to List View before entering TM.

Test this out first on something small. Since the original Mac is no longer around, if you click Restore, you may get a prompt about the original location not being available. If so, do NOT tell it to "recreate" the enclosing folders. Instead of clicking Restore, after selecting things, right-click and select the "Restore <items> to" option to get a prompt for where you want to put them.

See #15 and #16 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for samples, etc.

Give it a shot; if you get in trouble, post back, but I won't answer until tomorrow.

Good luck! 😀

I have the dead MacBook. When I try to start it, it makes the chime sound and the screen lights up. But then it clicks and I get a folder with a question mark.Is there any way to use this?

Probably not. That means it can't find a usable system on the HD, so you probably can't use Target Disk mode on it. If you want to investigate that, see Using Target Disk mode.

franz1 wrote:

. . .

I think because my itunes was on the old Macbook and now it's on Air with a new home user name, it won't let me use or sync some of my apps. Know anything about itunes?

No, sorry. Just this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1420

I have a bootable clone made from SuperDuper. It's a few months old but should hace all the applications and settings I want.

My plan is go back to the beginning with the Air, the use setup assistant to get the info from the Sparse file.

Yes, that should work. But use Setup Assistant, not MA. Then you shouldn't have permissions problems.

Before I do that, is there a way to change the permissions on the Time Machine backups to let any user use them?

No. That would kinda defeat the purpose, after all.

But if you use Setup Assistant, and copy the user accounts from it, those accounts should have permission to their backups.