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Migration assistant not seeing external hard drive

I'm trying to migrate to a new Mac from a Time Machine back up. However when going through the migration assistant it doesn't see the external hard drive. It just keep "looking". The weird part is the Mac itself, via Finder can see the drive. I can even, via Finder see the Time Machine back up.

Any tips on getting it to see the hard dirve?

Thank you.

iMac 20" 2.4ghz, 4gb RAM, Mac OS X (10.6.6), iPhone, iPad 2, AppleTV 2, AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express

Posted on Jan 22, 2012 2:33 PM

18 replies

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jan 23, 2012 8:18 AM in response to Slapshot Scott

Ordinarily, I'd say one of the 3rd-party heavy-duty Disk Repair apps might be able to fix it. The "gold standard" seems to be DiskWarrior, but it's about $100 and there's no guarantee it can actually fix it.

However, I don't think it (or any of the others) can fix a sparse bundle disk image. You might want to check with the makers.

Any other ideas on repairing the sparse? Or how to access the files that are in it?

Can you mount the sparse bundle (by double-clicking it via the Finder)? That may take a moment or two, but if so, the Time Machine Backups disk image inside it will appear in the Finder sidebar and/or desktop. If you can, you may be able to recover some data, one way or another.

I must say this doesn't look promising and I'm pretty frustrated. I did what I was supposed to by backing and got totally burned.

Were you aware that backing-up to a USB drive on an Airport Extreme is not supported by Apple? They don't mention that in their marketing. See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk.

bencn

Level 1

8 points

Jun 27, 2012 6:32 PM in response to Slapshot Scott

I am using OSX 10.7.4 and my external drive was directly connected to my Mac via USB.

I had this same problem when dialling up Migration Assistant (MA) - MA only showed me 1 drive to restore from. The drive was labelled "Macintosh HD" and its icon was styled like a Time Machine drive.

So I called Apple Support and asked them. They explained to me that while the drive was labelled "Macintosh HD" it was infact my external harddrive. So I clicked 'Continue' and browsed the User accounts. Sure enough, the user account I wanted to restore from the external harddrive was listed there.

So, uh, yeah. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Jul 27, 2012 10:37 AM in response to Slapshot Scott

So I had the same problem and manage to solve it.

I gave up on the setup assitant, and tried migration assitant which also did not see the external hd.

I open time machine, and choose to use the external HD for timemachine, restarted and setup assistant now was able to use the exeternal hd.

Migration assistant not seeing external hard drive