Migration Assistant stuck on "Starting up..."

We have just had the same issue transferring to a Retina iMac with a fusion drive - it was stuck in this state for over an hour…we ended up force shutting it down and when it was restarted the 'Migration Complete" message came up.

We did then make sure we could open all apps and ran Disk Utility and Permission repair to make sure everything was ok. Starting up in Safe Boot Mode may also be a goo idea.

I have seen others mentioned to start the donor Mac in Target Disk mode (after running Disk Utility and Permission repair on it) and then start migration - if you have to do it again.

Good Luck.

Well, it looks like we're in the same boat here. I have a 15' 2011 MBP that I just dropped an SSD in. I've tried plugging in the old drive over USB and using a time machine backup. No luck either way. It calculates the space I'm about to use (just moving a few documents to accommodate the space shrinkage) and then goes to "Starting Up" at 100% where it stops. I've tried leaving it overnight and everything. No luck. I've repaired all disks involved and did a permissions repair as well. Did you end up solving this?

Hi, I have the same problem, did you finally solve yours?

Hello,

I have a a simple solution to this problem for anyone else who is running into this.

I own a similar system (2010 15" Macbook Pro w/ Samsung SSD) and had the same issue (being stuck on the 'starting up' page after the Migration Assistant finished and the system had rebooted.) After a few hours I force rebooted and it just started back up to the same "Starting up..." screen. All you have to do to fix it is hold 'Command + Q' (the usual application quit key combo) on that screen. That's it. It will ask you if you really want to quit the Migration Assistant ("of course I do!!") Then Yosemite will boot up normally with all your migrated files in place. Hope that helps someone through this really frustrating bug.

Thanks for the tip, but it did not work for me. The machine invited me to run Migration Assistant all over again. And instead of pretending to finish, as before, Migration Assistant hung at "3 minutes remaining", which eventually got up to 2 hours before I killed it (cleanly, via Cmd-Quit). And then the same thing again, try to copy Applications only. Via FireWire Target Disk Mode. I've never known it to fail before. And I've had to clean install the OS on three machines because Yosemite made them all unstable. Having Migration Assistant screw up as well is the final insult.

Thanks! Worked perfectly!

Thanks for this; it wouldn't have occurred to me to try it. The donor Mac had told me the migration was successful. Still a bug months later.

THANK YOU!