Migration Assistant Not Seeing Time Machine Backups

OK, so today I sold my MacBook Air and purchased a 15" 2012 MacBook Pro. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and put a 1TB 7200RPM hybrid hard drive in it. Things were going fine installing Mountain Lion using Internet Recovery but I've hit a snag when trying to migrate from my previous Time Machine backups. I made two Time Machine backups of my Air on two separate hard drives, both are USB 3.0 models. When using Migration Assistant and migrating from a Time Machine backup, I enter my password and then the Migration Assistant hangs there. It doesn't matter which hard drive I use. One is an older 1TB drive and another is a brand new 2TB drive that I opened up yesterday.

I only have one plugged in at a time but Migration Assistant just hangs with both. Everything is in my Time Machine backup including Parallels, my Virtual Machines, their programs, and various other OS X programs/settings that I have. I can see the Time Machine files when I browse the contents of each hard drive. These hard drives do not have anything else on them, just the ~160GB Time Machine backups. Does anyone have any insight? I haven't setup Time Machine on the new system yet as I want to restore the older settings/files first.

 

Maybe try plugging the drives into a USB 2.0 hub then plugging that into your Mac? Could be USB 3.0 incompatibility rearing its ugly head.

 

I don't have a USB 2.0 hub, my Mac only has USB 3.0 ports. One of the drives also works through FireWire 800 but the same problem exists no matter what I use to connect it. The drives work through USB 3.0 just fine with read and write speeds around 60 MB/s each. When going through FireWire 800, one of the drives achieves about 750 Mbps. Either way, both drives work and don't have any bad sectors. The backups are also completely the same.

 

what do you man by "hangs there?" how long have you waited? if you have a ton of data it can take hours to restore.... and even a long time before it seems to be reacting.

 

still do you have a usb2 case for those drives? USB3 is not reliable when it comes to OSes

 

I let it sit there overnight tonight (over 8 hours), it still doesn't discover my hard drive. Before, I was letting it sit there for a good 3.5 hours (I watched almost all of Braveheart on Netflix) before giving up.

These are USB 3.0 portable hard drives, I can't pop them out of their enclosures or anything. One is made by Seagate and the other is made by Western Digital. Both house my ~160GB backup, the same backup.

I have so far just gone through and manually copied programs over such as iPhoto along with my photo library. It's working but I would rather have an automatic process. Things are working fine manually though whether I use one drive or the other, USB 3.0 or FireWire 800.

Edit: Manually copying things over has failed for both my copy of Office 2011 along with Parallels 7 and my two virtual machines. I need to use the Migration Assistant for these.

 

If you have a friend/relative who still has a USB 2.0 drive, you could try cloning one of your backup drives and then try restoring with the migration assistant. It's not a simple solution, but if your problem is USB 3.0 (which I don't know if it is), that might just fix it.

 

I was able to restore everything eventually, not using Migration Assistant. I booted to the recovery partition and restored from a Time Machine backup there. For whatever reason, that utility saw my previous backup just fine and restored it. I took a gamble as that procedure is only supposed to be used when restoring a Time Machine backup onto the same computer, not a different one. It worked though. My Mac took forever when booting up for the first time but now it fully restarts in about 28 seconds (cold boots in 25). That was all with the drives hooked up via USB 3.0 as well. All my files, documents, programs, a virtual machines (along with their documents and programs) are there, intact, and running just fine.

I had a USB 2.0 hub at work that I tried using but it didn't solve the problem either, same exact issue using the Migration Assistant; it would never see any of my Time Machine backups.

 

Very strange indeed. Glad you got it sorted, though.