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Level 1

8 points

Transferring contents of old MB Air to new

First let me begin by saying I have contacted Apple Support 3 times for help on this. My take-away is that support help w/problem solving is greatly diminished during this reduced workforce era we're in. The problem: old MB Air (mid-2013) that has been crashing randomly resulted in the purchase of a new one. Migration Assistant between the two machines goes swimmingly until 20-35 min remaining and then quits. Using my external hard-drive (passport for Mac) and Anker 7in1 USB-C hub and launching Migration Assistant results in a continuous "looking for source" msg. Ext. hard drive is showing up on desktop though

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 6, 2020 11:39 AM

Best reply

HWTech

Level 9

55,874 points

Posted on Jul 6, 2020 6:46 PM

Have you run Disk Utility First Aid on the old 2013 MBAir? Make sure to run First Aid on the physical drive and the Container instead of on just the "Macintosh HD" volume. Even if Disk Utility shows a green "OK", make sure to check the Details to see if there are any unfixed errors. I have personally seen Disk Utility report everything is "OK", but the details show otherwise. Same thing goes with the external hard drive.

Have you tried putting the old 2013 MBAir into Safe Mode while trying to use Migration Assistant?

Have you tried putting the old 2013 MBAir into Target Disk Mode and connecting it to the new Mac so the old computer appears as an external drive?

When using Migration Assistant have you tried to migrate just your main user account (uncheck all other items including other user accounts)? Then try migrating the next user account if you have more than one user account. Then try migrating your settings if you want.

If these things don't help, then you may just have to manually transfer just your documents instead of the complete user account, settings, and apps.

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Transferring contents of old MB Air to new

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