Why can't I see my old Time Machine Mackups?

When opening up time machine today I can only see today's backup.  All of the panes that are "behind" today's backup are empty, and the timeline on the right reports only today and now. 
But viewing time machine in Preferences I see that the oldest backup is Nov 6, 2013.  But I can't find that one, or any one subsequent to that one.  
My basic problem is that an external HD crashed yesterday.  It was in my Time Machine backups, but since I can only see today's backup (i.e., after the disk when missing from the system), I can't recover the data.  I am left reverting to Backblaze restores, which are more of a pain. 
Thanks,  --sw

You can migrate from one machine to another provided both machines are able to boot from the same version of OS X. But that is not the case for you because the two computers have different hardware. The new hardware requires a special build of Mountain Lion. Your old machine uses a different build making its version of Mountain Lion incompatible with the new computer.
Once there is a new public release of Mountain Lion compatible with both computers, then you can install on each as well as migrate from one to the other.
This is a special situation that only occurs when there is a change in hardware that occurs before the public release of OS X has been updated for the new hardware.

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