User Not Found Using Migration Assistant and Time Machine

My iMac running Leopard kernel panicked which forced me to do a hard reset. After rebooting, the account I was logged in as disappeared. Fortunately, that wasn't the admin account. I logged into my admin account and thought I would use Migration Assistant to recreate the missing account (I did run Disk First Aid first to ensure the hard drive was in good working order). However, Migration Assistant does not list the missing user account when reading my Time Machine backup. I do see the user if I go directly into into Time Machine. I'm guessing that Migration Assistant may only be looking at the most recent backup which obviously doesn't contain the missing user.
Suggestions on how to restore the missing user or how to get Migration Assistant to read all of the users in my Time Machine backups?

BobParr wrote:
I'm guessing that Migration Assistant may only be looking at the most recent backup which obviously doesn't contain the missing user.
Correct.
Suggestions on how to restore the missing user or how to get Migration Assistant to read all of the users in my Time Machine backups?
How many backups were done after the problem occurred? One possibility would be to delete those backups (see #12 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum), so the last one has the missing user's data, and Migration Assistant can find it. If you do that, once everything's properly restored, boot up from your Leopard Install disk, then reboot normally. That will trigger a "deep traversal" in the next backup, where TM will compare everything on your system to it's backups, thus assuring that nothing was lost via the earlier deletions.
Another would be to do a full restore from Time Machine, per #14 in the FAQ.

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