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Migration Assistant "Looking for other computers ..."

After a new installation of Lion, I can´t restore my users from a Time Machine Backup with the Migration Assistant. In the Time Machine disk I have only the users backup, not the complete MacBook Pro. The back is from the same machine with Lion.

See the image attach.


User uploaded file

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), 4 GB RAM

Posted on Aug 17, 2011 11:33 PM

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14 replies

Nov 11, 2011 11:30 PM in response to inetworkcl

My MBP was backed up to a Time Capsule while running Snow Leopard. My drive crashed recently and had to put in a new Harddrive and installed the Lion OS (10.7.2). Went to restore my files from my Time Capsule using Migration Assistant and I just get the spinning wheel saying "Looking for other computers...". Very frustrating. I hope there is a fix for this.

Dec 24, 2011 7:33 PM in response to inetworkcl

I just experienced the exact same problem, and spent about two hours trying to find an answer online, until I finally got it to work.


I got stuck at the same step that you did, both when I tried it on the Setup Assistant initially, and later when I gave up on Setup Assistant, made a user, and tried Migration Assistant.


What finally worked was this: In the Finder on the new Mac, I opened the disk that contained the Time Machine backup, and double-clicked on the backup file itself (a single file with a name ending in ".sparsebundle"). This caused a new disk volume to mount itself on the desktop, and suddenly Migration Assistant recognized THIS volume as a Time Machine disk. Everything else has proceeded nicely, and the restore is humming away as I type this.


One other caveat, which I learned in my search... Apparently if you are restoring via Migration Assistant, you can't restore to a user account that you are currently on, and you can't restore to a user account with the same name as the one you are restoring, without replacing the former. So what I had to do (Since I had already made a new user on the new computer with the same name as the user on the Time Machine backup) was make a temporary fake user with admin privileges, log in as that user, use Migration Assistant to restore the Time Machine backup and choose the option to REPLACE the same-name user on the new computer, and then later I will delete this fake user.


Surprisingly complicated, it seems... And unbelievable that this would be the way Apple intended the process to go. I still am not sure how I could have gotten this to work from the start within Setup Assistant, which obviously you're supposed to be able to do,

Dec 24, 2011 7:40 PM in response to DrSam

DrSam wrote:

. . .

One other caveat, which I learned in my search... Apparently if you are restoring via Migration Assistant, you can't restore to a user account that you are currently on, and you can't restore to a user account with the same name as the one you are restoring, without replacing the former.

Yes, other than using Setup Assistant when your Mac first starts up, that's the only workaround.


See option #4 in Problems after using Migration Assistant


And unbelievable that this would be the way Apple intended the process to go. I still am not sure how I could have gotten this to work from the start within Setup Assistant, which obviously you're supposed to be able to do,

That's not how it's supposed to work. Setup Assistant should have found the sparsebundle and shown it in the Select the Source window. Usually it does.


It's possible the backups were slightly damaged. It's also possible clicking Continue on that window might have, uh, kick-started it, as it did for a couple of other folks.

Dec 24, 2011 7:58 PM in response to Pondini

Pondini wrote:


DrSam wrote:

. . .

One other caveat, which I learned in my search... Apparently if you are restoring via Migration Assistant, you can't restore to a user account that you are currently on, and you can't restore to a user account with the same name as the one you are restoring, without replacing the former.

Yes, other than using Setup Assistant when your Mac first starts up, that's the only workaround.


See option #4 in Problems after using Migration Assistant


And unbelievable that this would be the way Apple intended the process to go. I still am not sure how I could have gotten this to work from the start within Setup Assistant, which obviously you're supposed to be able to do,

That's not how it's supposed to work. Setup Assistant should have found the sparsebundle and shown it in the Select the Source window. Usually it does.


It's possible the backups were slightly damaged. It's also possible clicking Continue on that window might have, uh, kick-started it, as it did for a couple of other folks.


I agree that Setup Assistant "should" have found it, but it didn't... That was what my last sentence was referring to as well.


For what it's worth, I had tried clicking on the grayed-out continue button like people here suggested. For me at least, it acted like every other grayed-out button has, and did not respond.


You may be right that my backup .sparsebundle was damaged or something, but I'm not really sure why that would be or how one might know, or even what to do about it if you did suspect that to be the case. (It checks out on Disk Utility, and Finder has no problem with it. Heck, even Time Machine recognizes it as an "Other Disk" backup and lets me browse it. I just couldn't get the Setup & Migration Assistants to recognize it.)


I figured now that I got it to work I'd document my experience here for the benefit of the next poor guy who has to spend his Christmas eve Googling for this thread...

Dec 24, 2011 8:07 PM in response to DrSam

DrSam wrote:

. . .

You may be right that my backup .sparsebundle was damaged or something, but I'm not really sure why that would be or how one might know, or even what to do about it if you did suspect that to be the case.

It's possible that the act of manually mounting it fixed whatever was wrong. OSX does do some checking when mounting a volume.


And no, there's no way you'd know that, and the only way to do it from Setup Assistant would be to quit Setup Assistant and use Terminal.


When someone posts here with such a problem, we advise them to do basically what you did -- set up a user account, use it to Repair the backups, then use the workaround in the link above. It doesn't happen frequently, but isn't unheard-of either, unfortunately.

Feb 26, 2012 1:22 PM in response to inetworkcl

I also experienced two hung-up computers (MacBook Pro -> MacBook Air) that could not find one another within Migration Assistant, despite the fact that the two machines were available as shared computers within the Finder. After three phone calls to Apple Support, which did not resolve the problem (although the tech people were friendly and helpful in ensuring that both computers' system software was updated), I finally replaced the source computer's OS with the same version found on the MBA (Snow Leopard, 10.6.8). Afterwards, Migration Assistant worked perfectly (over my wireless network), albeit SLOWLY (est. 20+ hours) ... it seems that the MacBook Air could use at least one port (FireWire or Ethernet) that can deliver high speed file transfers. One Apple Tech advised that I could purchase a $29.95 USB->Ethernet adapter to accomplish this, which I found annoying in that I had been previously advised by the Apple Store that the file transfer was "a snap." Perhaps the adapter should be included with the MBA, or offered at the time of purchase (for less than $29.95). I'm a bit surprised by the rather weak support that Apple provides for this process - I've transitioned through more than a dozen Mac computers over the past 20 years, and I've never had this much difficulty migrating files, etc. Apple really needs to focus some attention on this.

Migration Assistant "Looking for other computers ..."

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