Q: Migration assistant issue.
Hello all
Here's the rundown of what I was trying to do and what I ended up with...
Source mac: iMac 20 beg. 2008, OSX 10.9.5
Target mac: iMac 22 end 2009, OSX El Capitan 10.11.x? unsure which final digit on the version but do know there was an update to, I imagine, the latest at 10.11.6 which I did not push.
Set up the migration assistant by direct ethernet cable, did not select everything as the source has 100s of GBs to transfer which aren't necessary and I'm not sure if this is what messed things up but when given the option to merge users (same named user on both), I chose not to.
Left it overnight and when I got up, source is running the same way as before, target is on, (fan and heat) but that's about it. Every 15-20 seconds, the cursor flashes at the top left corner then disappears to a spinning bars loader and cycles back endlessly.
Force powered down the iMac by holding the power button, powered back on... chime then apple logo and a progress bar underneath, never gets to the end and goes to black screen, just back lit with the symptoms described above...
I have no recovery partition, cmd + R doesn't do anything not does cmd + opt + R.
Shift when booting doesn't do anything.
Verbose and single user modes work. In verbose, after all the gibberish, I get the same symptoms, except no mouse pointer but the text square character at top left, I can also type but that disappears (weird)
Single user mode gets me to root user, tried fsck -fy a bunch of times, no problems.
Aside from all the above, I've scoured the net for about a day now with all possible similarities pointing to EC upgrades... but in my case, it isn't.
One link mentioned users/library/preferences and the deletion of com.apple. something something login...
checked into it, had two files with that name, one with an appended ~original (I believe) I did go ahead and delete both but that was to no avail.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Fredo
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11)
Posted on Aug 19, 2016 12:17 PM