Restore To new hard drive from time capsule stalls at opening time mach

I installed new hard drive on 2008 imac that had mavericks. When boot command R to restore from time capsule the process finds the time machine disk but then gets stuck during the "opening time machine backup" step. Does this mean my time machine backup is corrupted? Ive tried 3 times with same result. Any ideas on what else i can try? Could i use migration assistant to recover pieces?