Migration Assistant cannot deselect items (greyed out) - WHY?

I had this problem too and the solution was quite simple. Boot into the backup (which you would like to restore) and remove Server from the Applications folder. Then restart your new OS installation and try again.

Hello nicholasberlin,

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities!

I understand that you would like to select the information to transfer while using Migration Assistant on your Mac, but the choices are grayed out. From looking at your screenshot, it appears that it is still calculating data. I would suggest waiting for that calculation to finish and then trying to make your selections.

Cheers!

Click on the right pointing arrow to read the additional info.

Your screen shot shows in RED - Not enough space available to transfer. Select fewer folders in Documents & Data or turn off other items to continue.

Is your new Mac's hard drive large enough to hold all the selected item's data? Applications and the User account appear to be 500+GB.

FWIW, I believe that's part of the problem. He can't deselect anything because all the selections are greyed out.

FWIW, it wasn't me that said it was because you didn't have enough space.

Are you trying to Migrate Data from a Time Machine backup?

I have a similar problem on a Mac mini that I'm rebuilding from scratch (clean install of 10.11.5, followed by install of Server 5.1.5). It previously has 10.11.2 and an earlier version of OSX Server.

Before starting, I made two separate copies of the mini's HD onto two different external drives, using SuperDuper.

Then erased the mini's internal 500 GB drive, installed 10.11.5, followed by OSX Server.

Next step was to run Migration Assistant in order to restore my /Applications folder, and a user home directory.

At first, Migration Assistant found the external drive holding the copy, but it displayed a warning:

"This source is an OSX Server, but your Mac is already an OSX Server. You must first demote your Mac".

It was not possible to select the external drive in Migration Assistant.

A cryptic comment in Charles Edge's TakeControl of OSX Server book suggested to delete from the external drive:

/Applications/Server

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

/Library/Server (folder)

After doing so, the warning about the ext drive being an OSX Server disappeared, and Migration Assistant let me select the drive as the source for the copy. It then display the list of items that can be transferred, and unlike other reports here, I can select/deselect these as desired. But it refuses to actually copy anything: "Not enough space available to transfer".

• The destination drive (the mini's internal hard drive) has 485 GB free.
• The size of /Applications when I select it in Migration Assistant is just over 5GB. There's more than enough space available on the internal drive for the transfer.
• The size of the user folder I want to transfer is 47 GB. There's lot of room for that too.

If I de-select everything in the Migration Assistant list except for Other files & folders (25 KB), it still complains that there's not enough space available to transfer.

Has anyone made headway on this? It appears to be related to the fact that OSX Server was installed on drive previously. What other cruft on the external backup should be deleted to erase all vestiges of Server on it?

D.R.C. wrote:

I have a similar problem on a Mac mini that I'm rebuilding from scratch (clean install of 10.11.5, followed by install of Server 5.1.5). It previously has 10.11.2 and an earlier version of OSX Server....

Has anyone made headway on this? It appears to be related to the fact that OSX Server was installed on drive previously. What other cruft on the external backup should be deleted to erase all vestiges of Server on it?

DRC's info did help me in a similar situation - a new MacMini running 10.11.5 would not allow a migration from any of a variety of TM backups of older machines that I tried (running 10.6 and 10.8) due to a "Not enough space available to transfer" error, even though there is lots of space on the new machine, and the TM backups are fairly small.

For my situation, only the MacMini had Server.app installed - the TM backups were of non-server machines. Once I removed Server.app from the MacMini's /Applications folder, everything worked as it should - it was unneccessary to remove any other server stuff from the MacMini and when all was finished I was able to just move Server.app back into place and relaunch it and everything seems to be working well.

I added this info to a stackechange question

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/164315/migrate-os-x-using-migration-*** istant-and-time-machine-not-enough-space…

This all seems related to nicholasberlin's inability to select/deselect items from MA's window according to Migration Assistant on Mountain Lion does not let me deselect anything

Wow so this is a very old issue, now I'm on Sierra and also experiencing the same problem. So why has Apple not mitigated or at least responded to this issue?