Migration Assistant stuck?

[boston04and07]

I have a new Mac mini, and am using Migration Assistant to transfer my files over from my white MacBook. I'm using a Firewire 400 to 800 cable for the transfer. When I started the transfer this afternoon, (about 6 hours ago) everything seemed fine, and for most ofthe day things seemed to have been working. However, it appears to have stalled a bit. It was stuck at 1 hour, 6 minutes remaining for about 45 minutes. Then, it mved up to 1 hour, 8 minutes remaining, and stayed there for at least another hour. Now it's gone and moved up to 1 hour, 10 minutes remaining, and has been stuck on that for about an hour as well. Is this normal? I have about 380 gigabytes to transfer, so I knew it wouldn't be quick, but this weird time estimate is bothering me..

 

[boston04and07]

All right, it's now been over 19 hours since this began, and there's no end in sight. The time estimate has worked it's way up to over 3 hours, too, and yet the status bar has not moved. Help?? I don't know where to go from here. Is it even possible to quit and start again this far in? I'm getting desperate

Edit: All right, nevermind. I just got really frustrated and ended up pulling the firewire cord, since the migration obviously wasn't going anywhere. Once I did that, the "Congratulations, you're done!" screen popped up, and it took me to the login screen, finally. Once I logged in, though, the desktop looked strange - it's hard to describe, but all of my open windows and the menubar appeared to be flickering or lightly twitching somehow, even though the desktop image looked fine, and the connection to the monitor was fine as well. A restart fixed this, and now the new Mini appears to be working fine (fingers crossed!!) Who knows what that might have been. So if anyone ever runs into something similar, hope this will help!

 

[shinystarlet]

Migration Assistant took 3 days for 150 GB

I hope that everything continues to run well for your mac mini.

I was just going to tell you that I just completed my migration from my time capsule to my new iMac 24inch and it took 3 full days for 150GB. I just minimized it and let it run. I was able to use the computer during the whole time. I even did some itunes downloads. It sputtered and the time changed like you described.

I tell you this in the event you need to do it again, like. if your full transfer was not completed which I hope you don't need to do.

 

[jgoody10]

I read a lot of these Migration-Assistant-hanging threads for a while looking for help, and I just wanted to note here on macrumors what ultimately worked for me.

I was migrating from a Mac Mini to Mac Pro, both with Intel chips. I attempted it with an Ethernet connection between the two computers. With about a half hour left, the Mac Pro told me the Mac Mini was not responding. I clicked Cancel, and Migration Assistant got hung up on the message "One minute remaining" during the Cancel process. I left it that way for 12 hours and then called AppleCare.

After confirming that I had no menus at the top of the screen to use to Quit (because this had launched during setup, before I had ever gotten to the desktop), and trying Command-Option Escape without success, they told me to power down the Mac Pro by holding down the Power key for 5-10 seconds. They recommended migrating from my last Time Machine backup, and recommended again connecting the Time Capsule to the Mac Pro with either USB or EtherNet cable--not doing it wirelessly. I did this, and I was able to "complete" a migration successfully. But at this point, things were pretty messy on the Mac Pro drive. There were a couple of extra accounts and I had been forced to give my own admin account a name I didn't like. A lot of my music and movies had transferred during the initial, aborted migration, but I wasn't sure that all of it had and it wasn't located in the right account anyway.

So I used Disk Utility to erase the Mac Pro drive and ran through Migration Assistant again, this time using the Ethernet-connected Time Capsule from the start. That seems to have worked quite well.

One final note on this. The Migration Assistant that launches automatically during the setup process for a brand new drive has difficulty recognizing a Time Capsule hooked up through Ethernet. The AppleCare rep told me this is a known issue. So one has to click on the "No thanks, I'll transfer my data later" button, get through the setup, and then launch Migration Assistant from the desktop. Then it finds the Time Capsule no problem.

Hope this helps.

 

[Macguy97]

Working Solution?

For me I found a solution on Lion that doesn't require you to start again.

I was stuck on the last minute when I decided to start playing LIMBO
Of corse, this made my MBP stop responding when I got an error message with one minute to go with the obvious,

Your other Mac has stopped responding.

After more than an hour of troubleshooting, I decided to quit Migration Assistant on my MBP. I got the various warnings...

Solution:

On the Mac which the data is transferring from, hit cancel.
Ignore the prompts.
Start up Migration Assistant again, (on the Mac which you just quitted it on)
Go through the transfer to another Mac stuff...
Leave it plugged in after the pas code prompt comes up.

For me, this rebooted the whole "stuck" issue.

 

[chinchin309]

I read a lot of these Migration-Assistant-hanging threads for a while looking for help, and I just wanted to note here on macrumors what ultimately worked for me.

I was migrating from a Mac Mini to Mac Pro, both with Intel chips. I attempted it with an Ethernet connection between the two computers. With about a half hour left, the Mac Pro told me the Mac Mini was not responding. I clicked Cancel, and Migration Assistant got hung up on the message "One minute remaining" during the Cancel process. I left it that way for 12 hours and then called AppleCare.

After confirming that I had no menus at the top of the screen to use to Quit (because this had launched during setup, before I had ever gotten to the desktop), and trying Command-Option Escape without success, they told me to power down the Mac Pro by holding down the Power key for 5-10 seconds. They recommended migrating from my last Time Machine backup, and recommended again connecting the Time Capsule to the Mac Pro with either USB or EtherNet cable--not doing it wirelessly. I did this, and I was able to "complete" a migration successfully. But at this point, things were pretty messy on the Mac Pro drive. There were a couple of extra accounts and I had been forced to give my own admin account a name I didn't like. A lot of my music and movies had transferred during the initial, aborted migration, but I wasn't sure that all of it had and it wasn't located in the right account anyway.

So I used Disk Utility to erase the Mac Pro drive and ran through Migration Assistant again, this time using the Ethernet-connected Time Capsule from the start. That seems to have worked quite well.

One final note on this. The Migration Assistant that launches automatically during the setup process for a brand new drive has difficulty recognizing a Time Capsule hooked up through Ethernet. The AppleCare rep told me this is a known issue. So one has to click on the "No thanks, I'll transfer my data later" button, get through the setup, and then launch Migration Assistant from the desktop. Then it finds the Time Capsule no problem.

Hope this helps.

Worked like a charm. Thank you so much!

 

[drpepper2]

First time I used Migration Assistant is Aug 2017 from Mountain Lion to El Capitan. I'm extremely impressed at how much time this saved me if I were to manually copy all the files, every user profile, and re-install applications!

(Incidentally this is from a 2009 MacBook Pro to a 2015 MacBook Pro that I got because the keyboard was still like it worked on a 2009 MacBook Pro and I cannot stand the new keyboards.)

The reason I used migration assistant is it appeared user profiles should exist with data before tweaking applications.

So, I reluctantly used Migration Assistant and wish I had bought a firewire cable first for the speed.

First I created a new unique temporary administrator on the destination Macbook Pro. This step was very important.

Then I joined both Macs to the same Wi-Fi 5 antenna (slower than wired) (it ultimately took over 8 hours 500 GB.)

(One profile was around 90 GB and it took 2 hours. Separately, the applications took 2 hours.)

Also both Macs are tied up during this process -- you cannot do any work on either one while this is in progress.

Then I setup the source Mac using spotlight "migration assistant" and selected To another Mac.

Then I duplicated one profile at a time; before network settings, before other documents, and before applications.

The reason I'm writing this post is because this is data should exist before applications anyway, and ** when I was duplicating applications it said it would take 2 hours 4 minutes **. So I looked at what time it would be done.

When I came to check it about 1.25 hours in, it said it had 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining. Which I found odd. It never incremented. I read some posts such as this thread about it and I considered cancelling but I'm glad I didn't.

Even though the time did not change from 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining, migration assistant did complete duplicating the applications as predicted in 2 hours 4 minutes. So the entire point of this post is to remain patient and believe the first thing migration assistant estimated.

 

[mikemillar]

I read a lot of these Migration-Assistant-hanging threads for a while looking for help, and I just wanted to note here on macrumors what ultimately worked for me.

I was migrating from a Mac Mini to Mac Pro, both with Intel chips. I attempted it with an Ethernet connection between the two computers. With about a half hour left, the Mac Pro told me the Mac Mini was not responding. I clicked Cancel, and Migration Assistant got hung up on the message "One minute remaining" during the Cancel process. I left it that way for 12 hours and then called AppleCare.

After confirming that I had no menus at the top of the screen to use to Quit (because this had launched during setup, before I had ever gotten to the desktop), and trying Command-Option Escape without success, they told me to power down the Mac Pro by holding down the Power key for 5-10 seconds. They recommended migrating from my last Time Machine backup, and recommended again connecting the Time Capsule to the Mac Pro with either USB or EtherNet cable--not doing it wirelessly. I did this, and I was able to "complete" a migration successfully. But at this point, things were pretty messy on the Mac Pro drive. There were a couple of extra accounts and I had been forced to give my own admin account a name I didn't like. A lot of my music and movies had transferred during the initial, aborted migration, but I wasn't sure that all of it had and it wasn't located in the right account anyway.

So I used Disk Utility to erase the Mac Pro drive and ran through Migration Assistant again, this time using the Ethernet-connected Time Capsule from the start. That seems to have worked quite well.

One final note on this. The Migration Assistant that launches automatically during the setup process for a brand new drive has difficulty recognizing a Time Capsule hooked up through Ethernet. The AppleCare rep told me this is a known issue. So one has to click on the "No thanks, I'll transfer my data later" button, get through the setup, and then launch Migration Assistant from the desktop. Then it finds the Time Capsule no problem.

Hope this helps.

[automerge]1581035925[/automerge]
Migrating MacBook Air Mohave to new MacBook Air Catalina - After 3 hours Air Mohave still says ‘looking for apps and docs to transfer’ and new MacBook Catalina says ‘Starting up.... ‘ is this normal or. Has it hung up? No sign of action...

 

[Brian33]

I would say something is wrong and it’s stuck. You will probably need to start over somehow.

probably you are trying to do this wirelessly between the two machines? If you have a recent time machine back up (or clone backup) of the old computer on an external drive, I would plug that into the new computer and do the migration from there. It should be much faster and might avoid errors over your Wi-Fi network.