Migration Assistant on Mountain Lion does not let me deselect anything

Hi,

I've got the same problem, I suffered a problem with the disc on my MBP seeming to fail a while after installing Mountain Lion and after restoring the OS I now cannot use Migration Assistant because it will not allow me to deselect anything and the total amount of data on the source machine is greater than the available space on the machine I want to update.

This has been a very frustrating experience over a couple of days, any suggestions of how to make Migration Assistant play ball would be gratefully received.

For the record, I am attempting to run the update over FireWire, Migration Assistant will not allow me to use Ethernet because the source machine in set up as a ML server.

Thanks in advance,

Gordon.

I have the same problem, I can not deselect computer settings and it over writes the Mountain Lion settings giving a boot error when I try to just migrate it all.

Someone Please Help

Just got off the phone with AppleCare regarding this problem. Evidently, this is expected behavior for migrating from Time Machine back-ups.

This suggests that best practice is to migrate from a clone of the previous drive. OP, however, has these problems migrating from a clone of the drive ...

Do any of you have OS X Server installed on your mac before the attempted re-installation? I do. I wonder if this is the true source of the problem.

I have the same problem with OS X Server installed on the source machine.

I have the same problem with OS X Server (10.7.5) installed on the source machine. I tried importing form a Time Machine backup as well as from a clone. Same result: migrate everything or nothing (checkboxes to select/deselect are greyed out and checked).

After following Apple's own documentation to the letter I am now stuck due to this issue, unable to recover only the items I require without bringing all the other junk that caused my need to reinstall in the first place.

It would be nice if Apple actually responded to posts on their own forum but my bitter experience says otherwise. Why did I ever switch from Linux. Sigh.

Any advice you received from a "genius" is completely at odds with Apple's own documentation at http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11275 as at August 8 2013:

You should be able to de-select some items: apps, settings, individual user accounts, and top-level folders (except Library) in user accounts.

The window doesn't show some of that initially; the little disclosure triangles don't appear until it has calculated the sizes, but should then look something like this:

When you expand a home folder:

Is that not what you see?

But no, you can't "pick and choose" individual files or folders within those categories, and there's no way to "merge" that data into an existing user account - MA can only copy the account and transfer what you select into it.

So, depending on what you want to transfer, you may want to create the account and let MA transfer some of it, then do the rest manually, or do it all manually.

See Using Migration Assistant on Mountain Lion or Lion, especially the pink boxes towards the bottom, for the gory details.

No Pondini, that is not what we are seeing. As described by the OP, all of the checkboxes greyed out and not deselectable. You must install everything or nothing.

We aren't noobs - this is a major bug.

I suspect I know the cause, but I have neither the time nor the will to prove it.

Its bad enough I've had to waste 2 days painstakingly rebuilding my machine one preference file at a time.

My time machine backup was of a disk protected by Filevault 2, and I have come across many issues with Filevault 2 in less commonly exercised use cases which were evidently not tested prior to the release of Lion.

Anyone else experiencing this issue, please post whether or not you are encrypting the disk in question.

Dave Whitla wrote:

No Pondini, that is not what we are seeing. As described by the OP, all of the checkboxes greyed out and not deselectable. You must install everything or nothing.

We aren't noobs - this is a major bug.

First I've heard of it, and haven't seen it myself, in spite of extensive testing, including beta.

And it's hard to tell how proficient you are from your post. Usually, folks don't realize they have to wait for it to get done Calculating.

I suspect I know the cause, but I have neither the time nor the will to prove it.

Tell us what it is, and we can try to replicate it, and if so, report it to Apple.

Anyone else experiencing this issue, please post whether or not you are encrypting the disk in question.

Yes, that might help narrow it down.

Dave Whitla wrote:

No Pondini, that is not what we are seeing. As described by the OP, all of the checkboxes greyed out and not deselectable. You must install everything or nothing.

This is exaclty what I experienced with both methods I tried:

1. importing from a Time Machine backup
2. importing from a clone made using SuperDuper!

Dave Whitla wrote:

Anyone else experiencing this issue, please post whether or not you are encrypting the disk in question.

Neither the source nor the target disk were encrypted.

The commonality that I found when searching through the Apple Support Communites forum was that the source disk had Mac OS X Server.

In my case, OS X Server (10.7.5) was installed on the source machine.

Dave, do you have Server installed on the source disk?

Henning715 wrote:

The commonality that I found when searching through the Apple Support Communites forum was that the source disk had Mac OS X Server.

In my case, OS X Server (10.7.5) was installed on the source machine.

Dave, do you have Server installed on the source disk?

Bingo!

My need to reinstall was due to there being no way to uninstall Mountain Lion Server.

I could go on about why I wanted to uninstall it but that is the subject of many other forum posts.

The Time Machine backup from which I was trying to import my local user accounts, after performing a clean reinstallation of Mountain Lion, was taken from my machine after the Server package had been installed. Following the advice of Apple support staff, I made a full backup of the Server installation before reformatting the HDD and installing clean. The instructions being followed claimed that user accounts could then be recovered from the backup using Migration Assistant.

They were clearly incorrect.

Hi,

I have the same issue as described: transferring accounts from a Moutnian Lion Server 10.8.4 to a fresh install of Mountain Lion on an MacBook Pro

If anyone worked their way through this I would be grateful to know how.

Thanks

I have an similar problem to Gordon Maynard, I'm also dumping Mountain Lion Server. I'm using a fresh disk to reinstall and keeping the old disk to do migration from (the old disk had OS X Server on).

When I get the Migration Assistant up, it will not let me de-select anything and the whole image is 27GB too big to fit on my new disk.

I had seen this before but I had never worked it out before, so +10 points to the people here for finding this out and -10M points to Apple for not testing their Migration Assistant properly. From memory this has been around for over a year as I tried to do this last year.

Just to be free of the debacle that is OS X Server, I'm prepared to sit down at the command line with

1. sudo cp -rp <whatever> <wherever>

2. chmod <something>

3. chown <something else>

and do this manually. OS X Server is so poorly written, documented and supported, I brought a Synology NAS just to replace it. I think the NAS is far, far better value at over £450 vs OS X at £20 or whatever price I paid. Oh well, I'll put it down to experience and get back to manually migrating my data over to my freshly installed (and OS X Server free) Mac.

Rob

Just confirmed that I am unable to deselect anything in the Migration Assistant for a OSX Server too (a Mavericks'). The only way to get it around is to:

1. Delete the Server App from the source disk
2. Clean the trash

And then the items on the source disk can be deselected.

Really appreciate that you all figured out it was a problem caused by Server.app. I can add to the discussion a bit, but not solve anything. My ML/Server 2.2.2 boot disks became corrupted and I'm having to build from scratch. I've never successfully recovered over the years using Apple's high-level migration programs, but I figured I'd give this a shot. All my boxes were greyed as well. Unfortunately, in my case, I don't have the luxury of taking the box back down from a server configuration.

I guess I'm back to trying to manually recover wiki, calendar and contacts data. :-( Luckily I have a dumpall.psql.gz file that is okay, but still there will be some work to get through this (on top of the many hours I've already spent).

Getting a little frustrated here, Apple.