Just spent some time yak shaving when my powerbook stopped booting beyoond a spinning wheel of death. Finally ended up doing a clean install of Mavericks from a boot disc. A few years of installing software with various untested combinations of package managers like fink, macports and homebrew may have mucked up the OS a good bit.
At any rate – expected to be able to restore at least the files (not the tainted OS) from a Time Capsule, but it was not happening. Nothin but black screens and “drive inaccessible” messages. Most of the files and directories were backed up individually on other drives, but just to be prudent (and to avoid re-doing a small bit of work) I took the Time Capsule to my friends at Palafox Computers here in Pensacola.
All they had to do was reset the permissions on the Time Capsule.
To restore items from the (hidden) Time Capsule User -> Library I’m finding it easiest to open it via the terminal like:
mikes-mbp:~ mikekilmer$ cd /Volumes
mikes-mbp:Volumes mikekilmer$ pwd
/Volumes
mikes-mbp:Volumes mikekilmer$ ls
CleanFor2015 OpenOffice
Data Time Machine Backups
mikes-mbp:Volumes mikekilmer$ cd Time\ Machine\ Backups/
mikes-mbp:Time Machine Backups mikekilmer$ ls
Backups.backupdb tmbootpicker.efi
mikes-mbp:Time Machine Backups mikekilmer$ cd Backups.backupdb/
mikes-mbp:Backups.backupdb mikekilmer$ ls
Mike’s MacBook Pro
mikes-mbp:Backups.backupdb mikekilmer$ cd Mike’s\ MacBook\ Pro/
mikes-mbp:Mike’s MacBook Pro mikekilmer$ ls
2014-10-24-022205 2015-01-25-163227
2014-11-03-194334 2015-01-26-114939
2014-12-21-230249 2015-01-27-173601
2015-01-20-170806 2015-01-27-182101
2015-01-21-065617 2015-01-27-204010
2015-01-22-082449 2015-01-27-215918.inProgress
2015-01-23-083532 Latest
2015-01-24-172158
mikes-mbp:Mike’s MacBook Pro mikekilmer$ cd 2014-12-21-230249/
mikes-mbp:2014-12-21-230249 mikekilmer$ ls
Jan2014ReVersion
mikes-mbp:2014-12-21-230249 mikekilmer$ cd Jan2014ReVersion/Users/mikekilmer/Library/
mikes-mbp:Library mikekilmer$ cd ../
mikes-mbp:mikekilmer mikekilmer$ open Library
Which opens the saved Library folder in finder so I can drag and drop files to copy/restore.