Migration Assistant... 32 hours... REALLY??

[FogCityMac]

Connected old MBP with latest version of Snow Leopard to new MBP with Lion via ethernet 5E cable. Using Migration Assistant to transfer user accounts (2), network and computer settings, and files (~80GB) - not applications.

"About 32 hours and 7 minutes remaining" The blue bar is about 2mm from the start.

Really? Does it really take this long? I thought it would take a couple hours max. Did I do something wrong? I there. Better way? What happens if I abort in the middle of the transfer?

 

[Gav2k]

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Don't abort! It's normal!!!!

 

[Young Spade]

Connected old MBP with latest version of Snow Leopard to new MBP with Lion via ethernet 5E cable. Using Migration Assistant to transfer user accounts (2), network and computer settings, and files (~80GB) - not applications.

"About 32 hours and 7 minutes remaining" The blue bar is about 2mm from the start.

Really? Does it really take this long? I thought it would take a couple hours max. Did I do something wrong? I there. Better way? What happens if I abort in the middle of the transfer?

What are you using to transfer the data? And from where?

Mine was bout 120 gigs and only took 2 or so hours from an external hard drive to my MBP.

 

[Tycoonguy]

How long has it said this? It usually goes by way faster then the estimate.

 

[FogCityMac]

Started about half hour ago.

Update: "27 hours and 42 minutes remaining"

Is the estimated calculation off?

 

[FogCityMac]

Update: "30 hours and 9 minutes remaining"

 

[Young Spade]

Update: "30 hours and 9 minutes remaining"

Ok, you don't need to update us. Just leave it alone and let it do its thing.

 

[Badrottie]

last week I hooked up Powerbook G4 and MBP via Firewire it tooks 6 minutes to migrate

 

[gorskiegangsta]

What are you using to transfer the data? And from where?

Mine was bout 120 gigs and only took 2 or so hours from an external hard drive to my MBP.

I'm wondering the same. It took me only 5 hrs to transfer ~240 gigs (approx 750,000 files).

 

[robots3humans0]

I've seen this happen on mine too. Said something like 20 hours remaining. Ended up taking about 4 I think. I had nearly 300GB of files to move too. I've noticed that Apple's time estimation within apps is god awful. Installing Lion onto my SSD from a USB drive said it would take 40 minutes. Only took 20. Don't trust their timer.. just let it run and it'll be done in a few hours.

 

[Bernard SG]

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Not sure Ethernet the best way to go about it

 

[FogCityMac]

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Not sure Ethernet the best way to go about it

Apple Store rep said Ethernet cable would be faster than FireWire.

Update for Young Spade: "About 28 hours and 49 minutes remaining".

 

[dusk007]

Gigabit Ethernet would be but I am guessing you are running on 100Mbit.
Check you connections.
Now you transfer with something like 10MB/s.

FW800 gets you 70-80 MB/s
Gigabit Ethernet would get you 100 MB/s
USB 2.0 is even faster with 35 MB/s

Still a really slow process because 80 GB should transfer even with 10MB/s in 8100 seconds which is something like 2h 15min.

 

[Macman45]

I always Use

A spare external hdd...IMO Migration assistant sucks

 

[bigjobby]

Apple Store rep said Ethernet cable would be faster than FireWire.

Not if your ethernet is a 10/100 link which is a bit of crawl to say the least.

 

[jenzjen]

If you have a backup, why don't you just nuke the migration, clean install and copy stuff back? You'd be back up 'n running a lot faster.

 

[FogCityMac]

Update (13+ hours since starting): "About 22 hours and 51 minutes remaining". Blur bar not quite at the half way mark.

Backups of the old MBP using FireWire 400 to external hard drive were always fairly quick. If fact when I set up the old MBP from a PC I transferred files from an external hard drive and it was a lot quicker. It could be the darn cable.

There does not appear to be a way to cancel. What will happen if I just pull the cable out? Will I have to do a clean install as others have suggested? Or will some of the files have transferred and others not?

 

[Ole'schooliBook]

Is Wifi on?

Are you sure that wifi is "off" on both the machines?

When I started migration assistant the first time on my new MBP, it defaulted to wifi, even when an ethernet cable was connected. I just turned off wifi on both machines and voila! Everything worked great (2 hours for 320 gb)

Oh, and to everyone saying "don't stop" after you've started, I stopped it a few times to get the connectivity figured out and have never had any problems. After a hard-reboot, it would just load up to the setup assistant screen as if were the very first time.

FogCityMac, double check your connectivity. Turn off wifi on both machines before starting the migration assistant process via ethernet.

Good luck!

 

[FogCityMac]

Thanks Ole School iBook.

I believe wifi is probably "on" however there is currently no wifi connectivity in the space in which I'm working, ie, shouldn't be transferring data via wifi... although it's moving at the speed!

 

[FogCityMac]

Mission Aborted

Update: it's been stuck on "About 17 hours and 54 minutes remaining" for the last hour or so.

ABORT MISSION

Canceled Migration Assistant on both machines after approximately 16 hours.

Off to buy 400 to 800 Firewire cable. May bypass MA altogether and just transfer files user account by user account via file sharing.

 

[derbothaus]

It does this when it encounters a bad file or permissions issue. Lucky for us Apple does not tell you what file. Just stops the many hours transfer as if nothing happened. They really need to have a skip option for these things. Usually after failure or hangups I give up and do it by hand. Not all that hard.

 

[FogCityMac]

Update: "About 0 hours and 0 minutes remaining"

Mission accomplished!!

Bought a firewire cable. Used Migration Assistant. Less than one hour. All is good. The Apple Store rep was cute but gave bad advice on the ethernet cable.

 

[bigjobby]

Update: "About 0 hours and 0 minutes remaining"

Mission accomplished!!

Bought a firewire cable. Used Migration Assistant. Less than one hour. All is good. The Apple Store rep was cute but gave bad advice on the ethernet cable.

Just curious, but did you get to check your link speed over ethernet?

 

[g01d10x]

Victory !!

Ok .. I know this is an older thread, but I was having the same problem on my 2010 15" MBP after upgrading to a Crucial MX 100 512 GB.

Plan A was to recover my user info from a Time Machine backup, which is living on one of the hard drives on my Mac Pro. Both computers are updated to the current version of Yosemite, but when I was looking at the ETA it was something like 67 hours and not getting any better .. I contemplated a Plan B with Firewire in Target Disk mode or something along those lines, but as a last resort, I thought to leave things alone overnight and see how the progress was in the morning .. now it's the morning and the ETA was STILL in the 50+ hour range. I originally had the computers connected via an ethernet cable and had assumed that they would be using that network as it's the fastest connection possible (Both are Gigabit ethernet). To check, I turned on Activity Monitor on the Mac Pro, and switched off the WIFI to confirm that wasn't where the ~1 meg/second was flowing. Then watched as the network Data sent/sec: field dropped to zero. AHA !!

I restarted everything with only the ethernet cable connecting the 2 machines and now the MBP has already caught up to the previous level of completion, but only took 1 hour to get there (vs overnight). So now instead of 50+ hours on the ETA, it's down to about 3 hours, and showing a Data sent/sec: with peaks over 45 megs per second (a few 50's here and there if you watch it long enough).

So .. the moral of the story .. make sure you've forced your machine to use the fastest connection possible, or else you might get a surprise, and miss a week of work as a result while your machine sits there loligaging along vs RIPPING along

(FW max is 400 or 800 mb/s depending on your mac's ports, and Eth is usually up to Gigabit (1000 mb/s) if it's been released since 2010)

Cheers to all !

 

[MarkMigs]

Does anybody know what happens if you do cancel the migration assistant and simply leave it be afterwards? In my situation, I have a dead/dying hard drive that I removed from this MacBook. I then installed a brand-new hard drive (this time SSD), installed OS X from scratch, installed all updates, in then connected my old hard drive as an external hard drive and started migration assistant to transfer everything over. (I do realize that I could have manually copied over items into my new library etc to see which data may be corrupt one folder at a time). This was yesterday, and initially it said that it would take over 80 hours, which I was fine with having experience with dying hard drives, but surprisingly this morning, it says there is less than one minute left. That was over four hours ago. I am going to let it sit for the rest of the day and will check on it after work, though the clickety-clack of the dying drive is telling me that the less than one minute left may never happen. I am hoping that everything that can transfer has transferred, and I can simply kiss whatever was left in that last minute goodbye. I just want to know if anyone here actually knows if the completed data transfer progress will actually stick and if anyone has simply left their system be after using migration assistant and canceling like this.