Q: What do I do if the migration assistant gets to the very end of transferring data but won't complete the transfer?  I've been stuck on "less than a minute remaining" for hours!

Are you doing this over a wireless network connection?

And it may well be more, why did you choose the slowest possible method?

If you stop it you will have to start again, if you do I suggest a different connection.

Firewire or a 1Gigabit network.

24hrs is really long, I've heard over 12+ but ....

I would stop, delete the new user account, get a Firewire cable or a 1G network router (yours could be one, they are fairly common now) and start again.

You're welcome.

And ..... (just a suggestion) If I were in your place I would get the faster connection, reboot to the recovery partition and erase the disk, reinstall the OS and then use setup assistant rather than Migration Assistant.

Is this a record. I'm migrating from a MacBook OS 10.6 to a new MacBook Pro running Mavericks. The transfer has taken three days so far and it's been stuck on 'Less than a minute remaining' for the last three hours. I have heard of this state lasting for 12 hours before completeing. The transfer is over an ethernet network.

That's a very long time, I would stop it and reboot the machine, that is the only available alternative

I have left the machine for 24 hours, and then restarted the donor Laptop. The new laptop now tells me that migration is complete but when I reboot it is clear that nothing has happenned.

So I have plugged inthe USB drive used for the time machine backup and I am migrating from that. Estimated time - 58 minutes.

What a waste of three days!!

Clear that nothing happened?

Did you look in both user accounts, ot just your old one?