Migration assistant can't find my time machine backups?

Here's the situation: I just bought a new 13" Macbook Pro 2.53 GHz last night to replace my current 13" white Macbook. I've kept Time Machine backups on the white MB for well over a year on an external 500GB USB drive, so I figured I'd use migration assistant to move all my data over. Well, I plugged in my external HD to my new computer, it recognized the disk, and asked if I wanted to use it as my time machine backup disk for the computer: I said no, for the time being. Then I went to migration assistant, opted to restore from my backups.... but when I got to selecting from where, it gave me no options, just a totally blank selection screen. I figured I must have screwed up, so I tried rebooting, then making the external HD my backup location, all to no avail. The only thing I can think of that's messing it up is the fact that I have probably 50GB of virtual machines and other things on the HD in a separate folder from my backups.
What am I doing wrong?

mily_pl wrote:
I've found the solution!
You have to simply delete from TM disk all backup folders made by Snow Leopard. Then migration assistant will see your backups made from 10.5 Leopard.
Do that only as a last resort, and only via TM, not the Finder, as that can hopelessly corrupt your backups. See item #12 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.

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