stevemazich

Q: Migration Assistant in Mavericks is Broken

I boot a Mac into Target Disk Mode, connect it to the Mac I want the User Home Folder from, and launch Migration Assistant on the source computer. When it displays the drive, instead of the orange drive icon titled Macintosh HD (Thunderbolt or FireWire) it displays as a white sheet titled Macintosh HD. When you click Continue your options to migrate are Applications and network settings only. The size of what will be migrated is smaller than what you would expect for the Applications folder, and the migration completes in about a minute. I have to do this dance of un-mounting, remounting; un-mounting and rebooting both computers: booting the computer with the Target Disk Mode computer attached to the source; attaching it to the source after booting up... Eventually the drive will show up with the orange icon and the migration will work properly but rarely does it happen the first time. But why?!?! Is Migration Assistant just utterly broken? I thought it was OS related at first from 10.8 to 10.9 but I've tried just about all combinations. Going from 10.6 to 10.9 (not happening), from 10.7 to 10.9 (nope), 10.8 to 10.9 (sometimes after I do the dance), and 10.9 to 10.9 after doing the dance. Seriously, it's only worked for me like it's supposed to less than 10% of the time. And my work has involved over 50 migrations since Mavericks has been released. I've always run Software Update on the computer I want to migrate from. So 10.8 machines are updated to 10.8.5 first, etc. When I go from Mavericks to Mavericks I make sure they are at the same (10.9.2 to 10.9.2, etc.). Nothing seems to work cleanly.

Posted on Oct 8, 2014 12:36 PM

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Q: Migration Assistant in Mavericks is Broken

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