setup assistant threatening to take a really long time

Question

setup assistant threatening to take a really long time

Hey all-

Just got a brand new 27-inch iMac. In the setup assistant, i choose to import al the user and application data and settings from my old computer, a mid-2010 13 inch Macbook Pro. I connected the two via a nine-pin (I think? it's 800) Firewire cable with a Thunderbolt adapter.

When the import started, after what seemed like an unusually long time waiting for setup, it finally told me it was importing and gave me ludicrously long wait time -- 41 hours or so. I know a lot of times the time estimates aren't very accurate to start with, so went off and did something else for an hour or thereabouts. Came back and now it's threatening me with an even longer wait time: 45 hours, at this point. The progress bar is creeping along, but slowly, very very slowly.

I've used Setup/Migration assistant multiple times over the years and never seen anything like this. I've got about 250 GB of data to transfer, from the MacBook Pro's hard drive to a Fusion Drive on the iMac. Have I done something incorrectly, or is this a sign of something that's gone wrong? In using the Firewire/Thunderbolt adapter, am I somehow getting much slower throughput than I would through either tech individually? If there's a faster way to do this, is it safe to abort the transfer and start over? Help!

Josh

Posted on Oct 29, 2013 2:06 PM

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Joshua Fruhlinger2 Author

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143 points

Oct 30, 2013 6:04 AM in response to Joshua Fruhlinger2

Just a follow-up to this, in case anyone is wondering: I ended up aborting the file transfer the only way I could figure out how -- by powering down the new computer in the middle of the process. When I restarted it, I was kicked right back into Setup Assistant. This time I chose to do the file/account transfer from my old computer via a direct Ethernet connection and everything worked fine -- the transfer took 3-4 hours. This was the timeframe Setup Assistant told me at the start -- there were times during the process when the figure jumped up to 20 hours, but it quickly went back down to a reasonable number again. Everything worked fine after the transfer, and there didn't seem to be any stray half-complete user accounts or anything.

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