I want to use my Time Machine to migrate my information from my old iMac (OS 10.5.8) to my new iMac (OS 10.8.2) am I able to do this without transfering the old OS to the new iMac?

Some questions to get a bit of background:

a) How much data are we talking about?

b) How long did it run for?

c) Over what connnection type did you do it over?

d) Were you watching syslog or do you have copies of the logs?

e) Were you doing it from the primary partishion or the recover partishion?

I believe that when you first turn on an iMac it will ask you if you want to transfer data (e.g. from Time Machine backup)

Setup or Migration Assistant doesn't migrate the OS. It just transfers data and applications.