Migration Assistant Hangs at End?

try what tnorth says. I had to do the same thing to transfer my files. I was lucky that Migration Assistant transferred my APPs. That is all I used MA for.

Please start using Time Machine going forward.

I tried Migration Assistant to transfer from my 2013 MBPro to my new Mac Mini - the two were connected by an Ethernet cable. Waited on "less than a minute ..." bar for nearly 8 hours; gave up, and yanked the Ethernet cable. Will try the Time Machine Backup drive next. I am sorely disappointed with Apple this time. I have done migration twice several years ago with no hassles.

Just went through the Migration Assistant Routine transferring from a late 2012 MacBook Pro to a iMac 5k. Ran into the same 1 minute finishing --- but hours pass by without finishing issue. So frustrating for a first time experience. I'll save the editorial, and just say, I believe the guys at Apple should take hints from this forum & get it right.

Cutting to the chase, here is what finally worked for me -- and it was less than 2hrs w/ 500Gb of data (and all apps) transferred from the source MBPro w/ SSD hard drives. These instructions refer to modern Mac's with Thunderbolt connections. You could adapt these instructions to work with older macs (firewire, etc.) -- your mileage will vary. I am recommending 3rd party software here, and I can only speak from my experience, which I based on the reviews for DiskWarrior -- which are stellar. I seriously recommend backing up your ***Source Mac sufficiently before attempting to use DiskWarrior. In my case I have sufficient backups... so on I went.

Tools:

I took Mark's advise and bought a copy of DiskWarrior. $100-ish. Glad I did. I then went a bought an official Mac Thunderbolt cable $39 for 2 meter cable.

Those are the additional tools you need for a quick migration.

Make certain there are several Gb of room on the source (original) Mac. As you'll be rewriting the directory structure + who knows what, back to the drive.

Next I placed the ***Source Mac into Target Disk Mode. "Target Disk mode"-- weird name, but follow along. Instructions on how to do this here: OS X Mountain Lion: Transfer files between two computers using target disk mode

On the screen of your ***Source Mac, it will have a Thunderbolt Icon on it

Note again: What we are trying to do first is not transfer anything, but to run DiskWarrior on the target Mac.

Connect the Thunderbolt cable from the Source Mac to the Target Mac. *** Thunderbolt is a 10+Gigabit connection. Way faster then Gigabit ethernet, or wireless of any flavor. Note: Go for the best -- get a Thunderbolt cable -- at 10+Gigabit connection you have the fastest connection that you can connect to your Mac.

On the ***New Mac, you'll need to follow the instructions for installing DiskWarrior. It talks about using a DVD. I don't think it is necessary. Using Target Disk mode, you won't need the DVD. Just install per instructions onto your ***NEW Mac:

Install DiskWarrior in the Applications/Utilities folder of your NEW Mac, and run it from there. It will ask for license & registration, no big deal.

Then run DiskWarrior from your ***New Mac.

You'll need to follow the instructions for DiskWarrior. You should see listed in the drive list the HD for your ***Source Mac. Find this first, as it is critical.

Use the instructions (and a little faith) from DiskWarrior to do a scan on the ***Source Mac directory. Even at 2 years old, my source Mac had a number of issues that had to be fixed with the source directory. For me DiskWarrior found all my files, but desperately suggested I replace the entire directory structure. And I concurred with their analysis -- after reading the forums here, ****the directory structure errors are what is chiefly making the Migration Assistant transfer hang up****. So -again using their one click instructions- I replaced the directory on the Source Mac. It took about 2-3 minutes, and done.

From there, I was done w/ DiskWarrior. I exited cleanly, and unmouned the ***Source Mac from the ***New Mac.

Then rebooted the ***Source Mac to insure that it still booted correctly, and that my apps, files and etc. worked properly. Which it did.

Now I was ready to return to the Migration Assistant. This time repeating the process to again place the ***Source Mac in Target Disk Mode

On the ***New Mac, I erased the drive and re-installed OSX (do this if you wish to start with a stock configuration. I did this to insure I was starting from a clean slate -- there are many YouTube videos documenting the process.)

I reran through the first boot sequence that begins once a new OSX installation is first run. If you are skipping that part, you could run Migration Assistant directly.

In any case, I then told OSX that I was restoring from a TimeMachine or other drive. For a source, the Hard Drive from my ***Source Mac appears -- which is great, as this is exactly what I want to do. And I let Migration Assistant take it from there.
The file migration process over Thunderbolt was more than 2x faster than using an ethernet cable from the prior failed attempt.

And this time, it worked the right way. It actually finished in the general time estimate that it said it would. No 'waiting 1 minute to finish' nonsense.

There was a tiny error towards the end, saying it couldn't transfer something... but it was a non issue. I figure it was a Mavericks/Yosemite thing.

I rebooted the ***New Mac, and it worked. Files were there, apps were there. Ready to resume.

Thank you DiskWarrior and Thunderbolt. No regrets for these additional purchases. Time saved & I can resume with my day.

Thank you Mark.

-MB

Hey everyone- I arrived at this forum because Migration Assistant was stuck for me as well. It started at 2 hours, went as high as 4.5 hours, and then got down to less than a minute (this took about 6 hors to do) . Then, it sat at less than a minute for about 22 hours, but eventually got through it and completed successfully. The transfer was done through a gigabit ethernet network.

So, if you have the time to wait, it might work out for you.

Rocco

Working in all Mac Pro, transferring and migrating between separate hard drives, migrating users documents and applications. It hung at nine minutes for almost two hours. Googled, and it ended up here, and it started creeping… Slowly… Toward completion. So there does appear to be something wrong with the reporting of remaining time, never mind it should take this much time in the first place. I echo/Paraphrase what someone else above said "migration used to be one of the magical things that would happen with the Mac ". Not anymore.

Since it looks like I'll have to wait somewhere between 7-22 hours for the "one minute remaining" I may as well pile on... I'd like to think that Apple would have a way to use the number of posts about an issue to prioritize their bug fixes--if only this were true.

I am my third attempt of using the Migration Assistant (from a MacMini to a MacBook, both with the latest version of Yosemite), and I have two things to add: 1) After quitting at the last minute (on attempt #2), my receiving Mac ended up with about 80 GBs less disk space which then prevented me from having enough space for attempt #3. I tried everything I could think of to recover the disk space, but nothing seemed to work. As a result, I had to boot into recovery mode, completely erase the hard drive, and re-install the OS (along with all of my iWork/iLife apps, and various other updates). 2) You don't need to force-quit, you can just quit by hitting Command-Q; however, this may have caused the issue with losing disk space--or, those who have force quit didn't notice the reduction in available space on their subsequent attempts. With the smaller SSD drives, losing disk space just adds insult to injury.

I agree that this is a horrible experience for both veteran Mac users and recent converts--hopefully Apple can get their act together sooner than later.

I'm experiencing exactly the same... After the Migration Assistant fails yesterday, noticed my new Mac with 80Gb less disk space, had to completely erase the hard drive. Tried Migration Assistant all day today with no luck, 80Gb less disk space again, so erased the hard drive, reinstalling Yosemite right now.

Not exactly 80Gb but it was less (79.9Gb or so)... I wonder if Migration Assistant stops if the total size of your files to transfer is >80Gb.

My old Macbook from 2009 has 250Gb capacity, 180Gb of which is by music & movies. I'll sacrifice all the iTunes music & movies (transfer to external hard drive then manually transfer to new Mac), which leaves only 70Gb contents to move by Migration Assistant. I'll try this way........tomorrow! I'm too tired right now.

I'll add my 2 (Australian) cents worth.

working from USB 3.0 bootable done of my old MBP updated to Yosemite and trying to migrate onto a new MBP also running Yos.

First attempt failed with the loss of 300GB of disk space.

Second attempt was just apps and some system materials (20GB) that worked, and the 300GB reopened

Tried to transfer my user profile (the other 280 GB) Took ~2 hours to reach "one minute remaining" and has been there for 18 hours

Plan to leave for evening and overnight

Very disapointed. but not supprised, local guy charges several hundreds of dollars on the back of this bug. makes a nice living from it.

Suggest transfer music and movies separately to keep the size of the migration down

If that works I may have a new Scam (can't really call it a career!)

Same issue with "about a minute remaining." Transferring 360gb over Ethernet from late 2011 Mac mini to mid 2014 imac 21". About 9 hours to get to "less than a minute". And we're at 12 hours in that state so far. Making me the single least popular person in my family at this point, I suppose we will wait it out for the next 24 hours and see if it completes normally.

Pretty disappointing. As a Windows convert, I thought Mac's would have a better experience. I guess I was wrong.

Migration Assistant is a nightmare. I've never had such trouble. First attempt--said it would take 25 hours. Hung after about 12. Wiped new iMac and reinstalled and did not set up wi-fi. Then off again. Now hung at "about a minute" and "less than a minute." What a mess. Three conversations with Tech Support has not solved the problem of how to get my data on the new mac. Nice folks on the help line. But they can't overcome half-baked migration tool.

This worked for me. (werm42 's old school approach) I set my source (on an older 2012 MacBookAir) to Target Disk mode, then I used Migration Assistant to transfer a User Account and Files to a new MacBookAir (2014), but not Applications. After it finished the computer restarted automatically and then I quit Migration Assistant. I then used MA to migrate applications separately. The entire process to about 1hr and 15 minutes. Less than 200GB of Data total.

Good Luck all you MA potentials. This was my 2nd attempt. Frustrating.

After my last transfer, which was over ethernet and took a day and a half, I migrated that same computer again to a new mac mini- this time through a Thunderbolt cable. It was the exact same 300GB of data as before, but this time it finished in just a few hours.

I don't know if it was the greater speed of the cable or the greater speed of the receiving machine (last time it was to an old MBPro), but if I ever have to do this again, I'm sticking with thunderbolt.

Is there a good FAQ on Migration Assistant? I am running into similar problems where it gets stuck at the last minute and then it somehow loses connection with the source computer and then you're done...

Hi,

I'm on a Macbook Pro Mid-2010, where I swapped out the optical drive for an extra disk. Now I have two SSDs, one 256GB with my OS and applications, and one 1TB with my user folder and media and everything else.

I aim to consolidate everything onto the big 1TB SSD. I backed up with Time Machine, then booted into Recovery, and installed Yosemite onto the 1TB SSD. Then, I think it automatically goes into Migration Assistant, so I just set that to start (Applications and the rest) going from the SSD which previously ran OS X. It went to a screen that says "Transferring Your Information", with the blue time bar underneath. That loaded to completion pretty quickly. But now, it's just sitting on this screen and still says "Starting up..." above the blue bar. It's been like that for about 20 hours. Anyone experienced this? Should I keep waiting or did this process freeze perhaps? The mouse cursor still moves on the screen, so it's not completely frozen anyway.

It seems it should be relatively quick since it's transferring internally from hard drive to hard drive, where I thought the throughput would be even better than thunderbolt. Is it possible Migration Assistant is just somehow doing it over WiFi anyway because it doesn't know any better?

To anybody who is stuck on the "Starting up..." screen after Migration Assistant finishes and reboots, all you have to do to get past that screen is hold 'Command + Q' and it will ask you if you want to quit the Migration Assistant. It's already finished so exiting it will not cause you any problems.

Like others have mentioned, this appears to happen mostly with 2010 or 2011 Macbook Pros that have been upgraded with Samsung SSDs.