Insufficient space for importing TM backup with migration assistant

First of all this is not for my main Mountain Lion installation on my Mac Pro, it is on a VM Ware Fusion virtual Mountain Lion installation that is running on my Mac Pro also running Mountain Lion. So this is really more a question dealing with VM Ware Fusion (or Parallels since I have the same issue with that as well) vs. a problem with Mountain Lion. Confused yet? I sure am....
I am trying to import a time machine backup of my previous Snow Leopard drive into my virtual machine. I did not want to import this into my new drive because I am starting fresh and trying to clean up and Snow Leopard had 10 years worth of crus I am trying to get rid of, but I would still like to have my old SL drive running within VM Ware to help with the transition. I have a Mac Pro with a dual monitor set up so I want it to run in my second monitor and very slowly over the next few weeks get all the files I want and need instead of just importing a bunch of useless crap. 
Anyway, here is the problem I am having and cannot seem to get past this hurdle. When I open migration assistant inside VM Ware ML  and choose my time machine backup of snow leopard everything works fine until it finishes calculating the size. I deselected all the files and folder I possibly can which leaves 209GB. Even with every single folder deselcted it still give an insufficient storage error I have already resized the VMware drive to 400GB which is more than enough. In my real machine under Finder>Get Info it shows it as 400GB, but within the virtual machine it is only showing the Mac HD to be 40GB which won't allow migration assistant to import the backup due to insuffient storage.
I have a Mac Pro with tons of disk space so I have plenty of free space to allocate but I have tried everything I can think of but came up blank. Sorry if my explanation was overly verbose or confusing but I wanted to give as much detail as possible. Haven't really fiddled with the settings in VM Ware in a while so I must be missing something.
So, how do you import files showing as larger than 40GB from a time machine backup with migration assistant without getting an error that there is not enough remaining space? And again, I have already resized the disk to 400GB that shows as 400GB on my real machine but only as 40GB inside the VM Ware Mac HD. I also have Parallels if that is easier to do what I am trying to accomplish.

I just solved the problem! And this is actually a pretty big deal because experts at the VM Ware Fusion website and many other forums told me it was impossible.
So here is the guide to running Mountain Lion in VM Ware Fusion or Parallels with a partition larger than 40GB and allows you to import an old user account from Tiger, Snow Leopard, Lion, etc..
1) Make sure to shut down Mountain Lion in VM
2) Under VM settings expand hard drive to whatever size you like
3) You will need either a disk image or an actual DVD of mountain lion, mount that in your VM and choose it as start up. After rebooting open disk utility and partition Mac HD. Instead of only showing the 40GB limit it shold now show the size you created from step 2. Close disk utility and install Mountain Lion as normal. Reboot and unmount disk image.
4) You now have a virtual Mountain Lion with whatever hard disk size you chose.
5) Open migration assistant and do your time machine back up as normal from previous systems.
The reason you might want to do this are many. In my case I wanted to have my old Snow Leopard user account open and running on my second monitor since I just did a fresh install on my Mac Pro. It is easy to import audio, photos, videos but there was a lot of other things I want to take my time bringinging over. There are also many cases where I needed to open up an app and view settings. Now I have my old machine essentially running at the same time as my new install side by side which is fantastic.

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    ragob66,
    Welcome to the Apple discussions!
    Try this:
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    Yes, you can do this using the Time Machine interface.
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    Let us know if this resolved your issue.
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  • Pb with migration assistant

    Hello,
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    Hi,
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  • What's the fastest way to transfer files with Migration Assistant?

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    Thanks. Through further investigation my old iMac does not have a Thunderbolt port so that's out of the question. I think it was going over wifi instead of Ethernet so I disabled my router and am now migrating from Time Machine via USB 2.0. Estimated around 3+ hours now.
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  • HT4796 Help needed with Migration Assistant, can't find files?

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    Congratulations!
    ... Using migration assistant  I've transfered aprox 100GB of files from my PC which seemed to take about 2seconds, but have no idea where they are or how to access them.
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  • Transfer emails with migration assistant.

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  • HT4796 How to solve my situation of having several Mac users created for me as I used Migration Assistant multiple times to move files from my PC

    I recently tried to migrate data from my old and perpetually unstable PC to my new iMac through the Set up Assistant.  However, half way through the 6 hour process, my PC crashed (the exact reason why I finally bought a Mac!) and the connection was lost. I continued with the Mac set up and then tried again later to migrate the files with Migration Assistant.  Since I was nervous that my PC would crash again, I decided to do the data transfer in multiple migrations (ie. first I did photos and then after seeing that that was done successfully I did music and so on).  Unexpected to me, even though all of the 4 migrations were successful I now have 4 additional users (in addition to the one I set up durnig the initial process) because each migration created a new user.  Each user has  little bits of my data. 
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  • TM Backup Volume after restoring with Migration Assistant

    Hi there,
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    ragob66,
    Welcome to the Apple discussions!
    Try this:
    *Accessing Time Machine Backups From Another User Account or Computer*
    Yes, you can do this using the Time Machine interface.
    Attach the drive containing the TM backups to your computer.
    Control-click the TM icon in the dock and select "Browse Other Time Machine Disks...".
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    Let us know if this resolved your issue.
    Glenn

  • Can't access old backups after reinstalling Lion and restoring with Migration Assistant

    Scenario: App Store developed a random, repetitive, failure to update certain apps.  After trying two different solutions which only worked for a couple of weeks (including archive uninstall)  Apple Support and I decided to go the full hog and do a full Lion reinstall.  Did a full final backup with TM and proceded to reinstall from the recovery partition.  All went well.  I gave my new account the same name as my old original one (and this might be the root of the glitch I will describe).  When Lion was working again I used Migration Assistant to recover all the users, applications, and information. 
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    My new merged main user appears as "carlos 1"  when it should have been just "carlos".
    Do you guys have any advice that could help me?  Thank you in advance.
    My TC is a 1TB 2009 one.

    Carlos. wrote:
    As my new main account and my old one (coming from Mig Assist) had the same name, MigAssist asked if I wanted to merge them.
    No, there is no "merge" option:
    You can rename or replace, not merge.
    Unfortunately, the purple bars before the moment of reinstall are all faded and I can't retrieve any information from them. Nothing before that moment is available, not from the Finder or from withing any other application.
    My new merged main user appears as "carlos 1"  when it should have been just "carlos".
    You have two separate accounts now. 
    See Problems after using Migration Assistant for an explanation of what's happened (the blue and pink boxes) and a possible fix in the tan box -- but that won't work if you've done any backups since using Migration Assistant.
    If you have done backups, your best bet is to do a full system restore, selecting the last backup from before you did the Migration.  See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14.

  • Reinstalled and Imported Data with Migration Assistant, What went wrong?

    My MacBook HD recently went boom! After replacing it, I reinstalled the OS with the original DVD discs, a few steps later, I was offered to import data from an older computer so I plugged-in my FireWire portable disk with a CarbonCopy image of my old disk and proceeded with the import process.
    After the Assistant finished, only a minor import error with Missing Sync was displayed. When the OS was completely installed, I tried opening some Office apps and Dreamweaver but none of them would open. So I tried to reinstall them but then I discovered that after the disk image from the DMG files was mounted, I was unable to open its associated finder window in order to copy or install the apps.
    Does anyone knows why is this?
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    The FireWire disk is a backup of the original HD that went bust on my MacBook. I don't know for sure the exact version of the OS (10.4.10 maybe) but it was Tiger for sure. My Macbook is a Core Duo 13.3-inch model.
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