[willed]

Long story short:
Both my MBP internal HD and my external Time Machine partition disk for some reason died at the same time. I had to buy Disk Warrior to salvage my TM drive.

Now when I restore system from TM backups, the newly-restored system freezes. I'm guessing this is because the disk problems corrupted the backups. I've now done a fresh install of OSX 10.5.

The problem:
So as I'm unable to reinstall the whole system, I want to move all the files from the TM backup manually. But for some reason, random files on the TM drive are protected by permissions and have the little red 'no entry' sign on the icons. Is there a way to get rid of this other than going to 'Get Info' for EVERY FILE I've EVER CREATED which is what I face at the moment??

And also, why the hell does Migration Assistant not even see my Time Machine backups?

This whole system has been worse than useless. If I'd just kept manual backups on this partition this whole ****up would never have happened.

[Laminar]

There's a Terminal command for setting permissions.

It's been a while since I've used it, check out the chown man page for yourself.

If I recall correctly, the command to use should be something like (assuming you've already done a sudo -s):

Code:
chown -R shortusername:group /Volumes/TimeMachineDrive

The "-R" makes it recursive. Add in your short username and group (probably admin?) and the name of your Time Machine drive. If all works as it should, it will run through and set you as the owner of every file on the TM drive.

I'm sorry that Time Machine didn't work for you, it's saved my butt more than once now.