Time machine backup on external firewire drive is not seen by restore or migration assistant

Hi,
today the harddrive on my Aluminium iMac gave up the ghost. I have been backing up my system using time machine, so I wished to restore it. To my great annoyance I found that neither the restore option in Lion's installer nor the migration assistant after install allows me to select that drive!!! 
I have checked the drive, it's ok. I connected it to another Mac, it can read it just fine. Why the **** is it not appearing in the list of available backups?!

Hi Bob,
I would like it to appear along with the time capsule it self under shared, so when I click on the time capsule I would see two drives the time capsule and right below or above the hard drive. and I would like to be able to see it in the airport utility under disks under the time capsule in the drive screen, but the drive is not visible in either locations.
yes I have read many places that the drive need external power supply, as this drive is quite large 1,5 tb I did take one with external power supply. I do however have two other drives one 500 gb and one 750 gb without external power supply and they both work perfectly on my time capsule "plug and play" like it is supposed to, funny enough one of these drives do have the partition master scheme as master boot record even as I have seen several discussions where it is stated this would not work. on these new drives I have tried with the three different partition master schemes I have tried with mac OS extended formatting as well as FAT 32 formatting, I even formatted the drives on a windows machine to see. but it still do not appear when it is connected to my time capsule. Before my time capsule get the blame for this I have to add that I have tried on two other time capsules - though in other environments - with the same result.
so please any new idea is very appreciated.

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