So my PowerBook is on the road to recovery.  Time Machine didn’t work exactly as I expected.  As it turns out, when you’re booted to the Leopard installation DVD, you can only do a Time Machine restore from a full and complete backup.  I don’t back up this way.  My reasoning is that I’ve got all my applications, I really just need my data.  That, and my backup partition isn’t terribly big on the server.  So, if I pare down how much I backup, I can have more iterations of it.  So, I figured I’ll plug the server in via firewire mode, the PowerBook would see the backup drive and then I could restore to my new user on the new drive.

Not so much.

Because in FireWire mode, the server isn’t booted (and is just another drive) it doesn’t recognize that it’s a Time Machine backup.  So, I was able to mount the backup and start dragging and dropping.

This explains why that worked: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14