Migration Assistant stuck at 5 minutes remaining

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MimiSunshine Author

Level 1

5 points

Migration Assistant stuck at 5 minutes remaining

I just purchased a mac mini.

I'm trying to transfer my data over via an external hard drive formatted as a time machine back up.

My old computer is an iMac running Lion 10.7.5.

Brand new Mac mini running latest Yosemite.

Tried to use the migration assistant three times and everytime after about two hours it gets stuck for another two hours on five minutes remaining. I'm transferring about 200 gigs.

I've called apple care and have tried to no avail to reinstall the OS after resetting the Mac mini to factory settings.

Any help appreciated.

Mac mini, iOS 8.1.3

Posted on Mar 4, 2015 1:31 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

etresoft

Level 8

46,092 points

Mar 5, 2015 6:20 AM in response to MimiSunshine

The time remaining counter in Migration Assistant is wrong. Just let it sit. See Migration Assistant won't finish

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Answer 2

lllaass

Level 10

210,411 points

Mar 4, 2015 2:43 AM in response to MimiSunshine

maybe this. It would apply to Yosemite too:

OS X Mavericks: Migration may stall with "Sharing Only" user accounts - Apple Support

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Answer 3

Sep 24, 2015 1:30 PM in response to MimiSunshine

Too anyone who has this problem when migrating users to a machine that already has one or more users on there is a solution. In short create lots of temporary users on the target machine then do your migration. The number of users needs to be greater than those on your source drive/machine.

After days working on this problem this solved it and the process was seamless. Shows that Apple still hasn't got some of the basics sorted. It hangs/doesn't complete due to conflicts with existing users.

For those who need more details the article which helped me solve it is here.

http://pondini.org/OSX/MigrationProblems.html

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