Time Machine Full Recovery From Wireless Backup

I am reporting this as a learning experience for all.
I just had a hard drive fail on my MacBook. Apple Care was golden and now I have a clean install with Leopard.
Here is my situation. MacBook backed up via time machine on a wireless network. Windows on boot camp partition. Dedicated disk (1TB Buffalo) connected to wife's iMac via firewire.
I want to do a full recovery. I start up leopard and it gives me the option to do a full recovery during setup. I have no time machine backup list provided. I continue with setup. When I go to the recover option of time machine I am asked to select a file. This is when I call tech support.
Tech Support says I should have had the backup disk connected directly via firewire for setup to see it. Time machine stores the backup under these conditions as a Sparse bundle. Now that I am past setup I have to do a migration rather than a recovery. I start up the migration assistant and I still cannot access the sparse bundle as it is grayed out. The leap here is you have to mount the sparse bundle, double click, then it shows up as a disk you can migrate from.
Windows Partition, as TS puts it is "on its own".
The confusion for me was that I could not recover exactly as I had backed up.
I hope this helps someone. Cheers!

coma53 wrote:
It seems to be. All music, photos, applications, etc. are present. I have not had time to do a complete review of my migration, I will track this post for a while and report any problems. There were significant OS updates which were required. I thought that they would be included as part of the migrate, not so. Perhaps they are on a true "full recovery" from setup, any one know?
Migration has no option for any part of the OS. It assumes you already have it.
If you recover your entire system from a TM backup (assuming nothing significant was excluded), you get your entire system back exactly the way it was: the OS, Apps, settings, preferences, user data, etc.
You don't load a new OS from the Leopard Install disc -- you only use it for it's copy of Disk Utility and the installer -- everything else comes from your TM backup.

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  • "....To Improve Reliability, Time Machine Must Create a New Backup for You"

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    Did you happen to upgrade install Mountain Lion onto the Air or is it a clean install?
    I would suggest wireless is part of the problem. As a route around the problem, go and buy the USB to ethernet dongle (cheap) or the Thunderbolt to ethernet (fast but expensive), so you can plug the computer into the TC.
    Redo the setup of the TC.. even from a full factory reset.
    If you are on 7.6.3 firmware be a bit dubious about it.. especially if issues started recently after the upgrade. I would even suggest go back to 7.6.1 before you factory reset.. although that loses the info on which is the cause.
    Use naming convention of short, no spaces pure alphanumeric for everything. TCname Wireless name and hard disk share name (already correct with data).
    See C9 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
    This might be one of the more obscure ones, but I think it isn't helping using names that have spaces and special characters.

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