Migration Assistant Hangs at End?

SOLUTION: Need to use an old school approach with this!?!?!?

Boot the "donor machine" into Target Disk mode, and run the Migration Assistant ONLY AFTER running the initial set-up assistant.

This is what worked for me after 3 days and 3 calls to Apple care.

Machines: Mid-2011 imac (donor machine) to the new iMac Retina 5k.

This has been a nightmare. Failing with two separate Migration Assistant attempts here - iMac to iMac, and a MacBook Air to MacBook air, both to newer machines. Failed Wifi, Failed Ethernet, currently hung on 52 minutes for hours using an external Time Machine back local USB drive. Never had a problem before. Two days shot. Have not tried Target Disk Mode yet. Not happy at all. And this after acquiring an iMac and a MacBook to upgrade.

For most of you this thread is very very old, for other's this is a new issue. Today I had the same problem but I decided to wait it out. When migration assistant showed 5 minutes to go it took an extra 2 hours but it all worked out in the end. It appears that sometimes letting the computer sit will work things out, I know others tried this but their patience didn't help them. I suggest giving the computer some extra time if you have it. My post is meant to give folks some hope because I have not seen any people post a similar experience. I transferred over 2 TB of data via an external drive and it took about 6 hours. FYI the assistant displayed 2 hours to go for 90% of the process. Keep your fingers crossed if you are in the middle of this process when you read this.

Yes it's worked finally, as per my post directly above. I don't have Time Machine.

(1) Copied all my music files/folders in my "Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/" folder onto external hard drive. Also moved all my movie files (by the way I don't use iMovies, hardly any big video files in my iPhoto. I just watch mp4/mov/avi files alone)

(2) Deleted all these music & movie files & emptied trash, leaving only about 70Gb data to migrate.

(3) Ran Migration Assistant, took only 1.5 hours to complete.

(4) Checked my new Mac. Firstly all my mail accounts were there. Secondly iPhoto - was told that it needed upgrading so downloaded & installed as directed. All the photos were successfully migrated.

(5) Transferred all my music folders from the external hard drive to "Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/" folder in my new Mac.

(6) Opened iTunes. It automatically updated iTunes Library, and all my music seems fine.

Yesterday my MacBook Pro wouldn't recover from a lid closing and wouldn't boot (gray screen with question mark). I replaced the drive, initiated Internet Recovery, and did a restore from a two-month-old Time Machine backup. Later I determined that the original drive worked fine when put in a USB enclosure and connected to the MacBook, so I used rsync from the command line to update the contents of ~/Desktop on the new drive from the corresponding location on the old drive and that worked fine. I went on #apple on Freenode IRC and asked if it were safe/advisable to do the same thing with ~/Library and it was suggested that I use Migration Assistant. MA did a semi-reboot like it does, but I got either a blank screen with a trackpad-movable arrow cursor or the beachball...and nothing more happened after 20-30 minutes. It wasn't reading from the old drive in the USB enclosure. I eventually held down the power button to shut the MacBook off, turned it back on...and it wouldn't boot; apparently MA wrecked the filesystem on the new drive. So now I'm starting over with the Time Machine restore, which takes a ridiculous amount of time given that my backup drive is a 5-1/4" 1TB drive connected via Firewire. With this and a new SSD inside, the restore ought to be just flying even if the machine is having to uncompress. So once I get it back up, I'm just going to use rsync - heck with Migration Assistant.

'Am migrating about 750GB across from a USB-3 clone of my previous MPB drive to a MBP SSD. 18 hours so far and it appears to be stuck (4 hours so far) at: "About 1 hour and 13 minutes remaining at 21MB/s."

So I suppose I'll give it another 24 hours and see if that allows the migration to complete.

Some service for a customer who has handed down over thousand$ for an Apple machine.

Sp_clark, just booted up my new Air a couple hours ago for the first time, and I am having the same problem. Trying to migrate about 150 GB of files from my old 13" Macbook. It goes through the motion, everything seems to be going along fine, and then it hangs at the end, saying "less than a minute remaining"...but that minute never ends and it never finishes. I hope Apple has a fix for this...new computer is pretty much useless to me without my "stuff!"

I am having the same problem with my new MBAir

had to cancel my migration from old blackbook to new MBA over wifi. After 12 hours, it got stuck on "10 minutes remaining".

The donor laptop cancelled out easily, had to shut down the new MBA recipient. After reboot it gave me new Mac set up screen again. So question is did anything transfer and is my new MBA now have less space on the HD?

I am going to get Ethernet adapter to speed things up this time around. Also, old donor Blackbook did not have the patch installed which might have been part of the problem.

I have a similar issue. Early 2008 Mac Pro, installed Lion on a new 2TB internal sata drive. Tried to run the migration assistant on first boot to transfer my settings from an existing 500GB internal harddrive. Takes about 3 hours to move the ~420 gigs of data to the new drive then hangs at "Transfering files to support applications... Less than a minute remaining."

I've run through the process 3 times now, each time doing an install on a freshly formatted drive. Twice internal drive to internal drive. The last time the old 500GB drive was mounted via an external sata to usb dock. ALl three attempts have hung at the same point, the last, with the drive in the dock hung with the pin wheel of death.

Problem...

Happening to me too. Black Macbook... this happens over firewire. I've tried both the source and a time machine and always hangs at the one minute mark. Not good.

I have same problem. Migration Assistant on MBP (with up to date Snow Leopard) to new MacBook Air hange at 6 minutes left - there for 16 hours and counting. Actually been running for over 28 hours now. The Migration assistant on Snow Leopard was just updated the pther day to fix some Lion migration problems. That is the level I used.

No Cancel or Quit capability on Migration Assistant so I guess I will just power off and see what state the systems are in.

So I let the Migration Assistant run overnight. Is stopped with a message that said 6 minutes to go, it never finished.

I re-booted the new MB Air and Nothing at all transferred.

Now doing a manuall migration process.

I tried twice and wasted 2 days. Always hung at end transferring from blackbook snow leopard to new MBA with lion. Nothing worked. When I cancelled the migration nothing ended up transferred. Ended up manually moving files, etc but took time to get all the settings just right

Want to also add that the space appears to be taken up too. Which means that it is moving the data, just not visible. I can move data over manually... but what about applications? Many of mine are on disk... no optical drive. I'm thinking this one needs to be returned and just wait for the platform to be more mature.