Time Machine external drive not displayed in Migration Assistant

I have been suffering repeated lockups with my iMac, so I decided to bite the bullet and reformat the drive and restore from a Time Machine backup. I have been backing up to an external USB drive, not a Time Capsule. It seemed to be working fine and I have successfully restored the occasional file. However, having reinstalled Lion, the external drive was not offered as a possible source for restoration. Similarly, having chosen not to restore during reinstallation, I attempted to use the Migration Assistant: once again the external drive was not offered as a source. Luckily, I also had an up-to-date cloned drive that was offered and I managed a successful restore.
Can anyone explain why the external drive was not available as a legitimate source? Must I always use a Time Capsule for a full recovery?

It seems that
in order for Mac OS X to realize that it's a Time Machine drive, there should be an invisible "flag file" (0 bytes in size) at the root of the drive, called com.apple.timemachine.supported - if this file is missing for some reason, Migration Assistant won't pick it up.
not sure that it's true but worth trying.

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