Migration Assistant Hangs at End?

I finally got migration assistant to work after days of trying different things and re-learning what everyone else has put on here. It is obvious there are some glitches in how the tool works making it flaky if you don't get the setup right.

If you get to this reply you've probably already had a couple of goes at migrating. In summary, what worked for me with my setup (iMac mid-2010 moving to iMac Retina 5K):

- turn off all energy saving settings on the old machine

- DO NOT run migration assistant over network (cabled through routers, cabled direct, or wi-fi), this gave me the dreaded "1 minute to finish" every time and never did

- get the right cable for your setup. I had to get a firewire cable and a firewire to thunderbolt adapter - use a thunderbolt cable if your old iMac is a little newer than mid-2010

- put your old mac in target disk mode (hold down T when rebooting)

- fire up migration assistant on the new machine and select the hard disk of the old mac

And hey presto - migration assistant completed first time using this setup without errors.

Good luck - it does work, hope at least one person finds this before trying it and failing

thanks for the advice!

I used target disk mode with thunderbolt cable and it worked like a charm. much faster for me as well. cheers!

Hi all. Had the same problem. Here's a solution that works like a charm:

https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/

I took Option 1, and migration completed in about 1 hour without any hang in the end.

Here's what I did in detail when I got stuck with a hung-up migration:

1) Press command-q on the new mac (the one you're migrating to) and confirm to quit the migration (don't worry to abort).

2) Take out the Time Machine usb from the new mac and connect it to the old mac.

3) Open the Terminal application on the old mac and type:

sudo mv /usr/local ~/local

4) Hit enter and type in your master password and hit enter again. The folder 'local' in /usr is now moved to your home folder ('~' is your home folder). We place it there temporarily to avoid the problems that cause the Migration Assistant to hang.

5) Take a Time Machine backup of the old mac.

6) Connect your external Time Machine backup to your new mac again.

7) Start the migration again and choose the Time Machine backup to be transferred.

8) The Migration Assistant comes to a point where it will write in red that there is a problem with user 'X' (your username) and that it needs to be taken care of. Simply click continue and it will ask you if you want to overwrite the already installed user 'X' (from the previous failed attempt). Confirm to overwrite it and have no copy of it, and then click continue. The migration should now run smoothly without any hang-ups.

9) When the migration is finished you need to move back the 'local' folder to its original place on the new mac, so open the Terminal program on the new mac and type:

sudo mv ~/local /usr/local

10) Hit enter and type in your master password and hit enter again. The 'local' folder is now back in its original correct place. Do the same (step 9 and 10) on the old mac if you intend to have that working still!

Voilá!

Thank you so much - Your comment solved my question!

A MacBook Pro blocked after a force quit of Migration process.

I'll pile onto this age-old discussion in case what I did might make things easier for anyone else. I am by no means a techie in terms of diving into the nuts and bolts of my mac system files/directories and what not; so a manual migration was NOT on the agenda for our family computer.

We had about 198GB of documents/applications to transfer from a circa 2008 iMac (Snow Leopard) to our spankin' new Yosemite iMac. Almost all music/pictures/home movies

Tried the setup assistant with the computers directly connected via ethernet cable (CAT 5e). 21 hours later the progress bar had gone about 2/3 of the way and was estimating 51 hours left.

I aborted the migration, took my USB 3.0 external hard drive that holds my Time Machine backups and did one last backup of the old machine.

Ran setup assistant again, connected the external drive and elected to migrate from the Time Machine backup. Everything transferred perfectly and was done in less than 1 hour. I needed to enter a few software registration keys when I started up some programs for the first time on the new machine, but that was only a minor PITA compared to stressing over the mac-to-mac migration assistant. Also, this method retained old versions of things like iWork 08 where new versions were preloaded onto my new computer, so I had a little cleanup to do there. I suspect, that I'd have had that problem either way though as long as I chose to migrate applications.

It would be really helpful if whatever corporate ***-hat is in charge of development/maintenance for the migration assistant product would bother to read some of the posts in their own support community to improve the product. While the migration from TM backup worked quite well, this part of the setup is definitely the weak link in the process of getting a new mac up and running.

As many in this forum I have wasted a lot of time with the migration assistant. It has happened to me now on more than one occasion that I got stuck "with one minute left". I have tried patience and let the migration run for 24 hours, without success.

Here is what helped me:

a. turned off all power saving options

b. used a thunderbolt cable to connect the "old" and the "new" Mac

c. put the "old" Mac in target disk mode, by holding down "T" when booting

d. start the migration assistant on the "new" Mac and select the hard disk of the "old" Mac

This worked within less than 2 hours like a charm.

I found these steps in this forum, but I could not find the related post. The credit goes to that person.

I hope this helps many of you.

I am trying to migrate from Time Machine to my new Macbook Air using the Migration Assistant. It's been 12 hours and the process is stuck in "finalizing your migration" at the top of the screen and "starting up" in the middle of the screen along with a bar that is filled in (showing how far along the process has progressed). I shut down the computer twice, a few hours into this and then again an hour later, nothing happened. When I turned the Mac back on it takes me back to that same screen with the same messages to report. Control + Alt + Delete doesn't do anything. It appears totally stuck. Now what do I do? I just got this Mac 2 days ago! GRRRRRRR!!

It's been a while but there's no question that a direct connection via Target

Disk Mode will speed the migration but whatever you do avoid trying

to migrate old software that isn't proven compatible with Yosemite - you

can always add those programs later, ideally as new downloads from the

manufacturer. IMHO this can be the cause of the interminable hangs.

Good luck, Tom

THanks TOm. That could be the problem, as I didn't uncheck the box for Applications when selecting what to migrate. But now it's stuck! I can't go forward or backward. Just stuck on that screen. What do I do?

As I recall, the Quit command (keystrokes) works.

Tom, do you mean ESC + the Command key? I don't see "Quit" on the key board.

Also, all Apple software was up to date on the Macbook Pro that I had backed up to Time Machine. I dropped the Pro and broke it so my only migration option was Time Machine. I did have some other non-Apple programs (Calibre, Per Se, etc.) on the Pro, but they didn't cause problems. So why would programs be incompatible on the new Air? Just curious. I'm by no means a techie! 🙂

Hi - Command - Q

Sorry, I can't tell if you're going up from Lion to Yosemite -

but if you were "up to date" in Lion doesn't equate to

Yosemite compatible - but if you have a new MacBook

Air I assume Yosemite is pre-loaded - perhaps not.

When I get home from work I will try Q - Command. If that doesn't work, I suspect I might have to make a Genius Bar date!

e - actually you have to do it in this order, Cmd-Q or

it won't work. Good luck, Tom