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Migration Assistant hanging - Catalina to Big Sur

Moving from a ca. 2012 MBP to a new MBA. Trying to use Migration Assisant to move my existing user account (under Catalina) to the new machine (running Big Sur). Assistant has been at “starting up” screen for over 5 hours.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Oct 24, 2021 4:51 PM

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Posted on Oct 24, 2021 4:53 PM

Here is what I found were issues preventing the Assistant from working:


. I had a couple of “legacy” user accounts, unused, on the source (Catalina) machine. I deleted those accounts.

. I had been launching the Assistant on the Big Sur machine from the Utilities folder, rather than as part of initial system setup. This may have been overkill, but I erased that target disk and re-installed Big Sur, clean.


Assistant then ran to completion, successfully, within about 3 hours.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 24, 2021 4:53 PM in response to drengfer

Here is what I found were issues preventing the Assistant from working:


. I had a couple of “legacy” user accounts, unused, on the source (Catalina) machine. I deleted those accounts.

. I had been launching the Assistant on the Big Sur machine from the Utilities folder, rather than as part of initial system setup. This may have been overkill, but I erased that target disk and re-installed Big Sur, clean.


Assistant then ran to completion, successfully, within about 3 hours.

Migration Assistant hanging - Catalina to Big Sur

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