Here's some more info that may be useful:
After reading joemikeb's post about
Checkmate, I downloaded and installed it. Checkmate found two problems with my Time Machine drive (at different times). The first was a damaged partition map, which I fixed with Disk Utility. The second involved a corruption of volume structures (AKA directory), which I fixed with
Disk Warrior. DW found about 400 errors (probably most were minor) but was able to repair all of them. Because of the large amount of data on my TM drive (1.97 TB), both DW and DU took a long time. DW took several hours but it was successful.
I have no way of knowing if there would have been a problem if I had had to restore from TM, but it's possible that some sort of corruption on your TM drive was responsible for your difficulties.
Just a thought.
