hschwersenska

Q: Freeze during Migration

Both Airs appear to have frozen up during Migration. Started at 20+ hours to complete now locked in at 3 hours to complete for 10 hours now. What can I do without having to start all over?!?

MacBook Air

Posted on Aug 18, 2016 4:48 AM

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Q: Freeze during Migration

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  • by dwb,

    dwb dwb Aug 18, 2016 9:43 AM in response to hschwersenska
    Level 7 (24,152 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 18, 2016 9:43 AM in response to hschwersenska

    You’ll have to cancel the migration which might require a force quit. If so, and if you were just migrating data you should be able to start over but if you were migrating data and applications you are probably best served by booting into the Recovery Partition, erasing the drive, downloading the OS and installing, then redoing migration.

     

    Let’s talk about how you are migrating. If you were using WiFi don’t try to do it that way again. WiFi is extremely unreliable unless you are migrating a few gigabytes. Even using an ethernet connection and migrating over a network has its issues. When Apple computers came with FireWire that was the most reliable and convenient way to migrate between two computers but when Apple dropped FireWire in favor of ThunderBolt that presented a problem. I tested many different solutions and found two that were reliable. 1) purchase a ThunderBolt->FireWire Dongle and use FireWire Target Disk mode. That costs $30 for a dongle you might never use again. 2) Back up to a USB external drive and Migrate from that backup. Since everyone needs a backup drive this is probably the best solution.