Coffee on macbook 2015 trying to transfer hard drive to macbook M1 air

[aqua8708]

I had a question about migrating data from an older Macbook (pro 2014) to a new one (M1 MacBook Air). My wife spilt a little bit of coffee onto her and it stopped working. We took the hard drive out of her 2014 and attached it to a drive (OWC Envoy Pro 1A) and plugged it into her new MacBook Air. We launched migration assistant and attempted to migrate the pictures from there onto her new device. Unfortunately, we were hit with "migration assistant the selected source cannot be used for migration volume contains a macos or os x installation which may be damaged.”

What options do we have at this point?

 

[Fishrrman]

Important questions:
If you quit migration assistant, does the drive mount on the desktop (in the finder)?
If so, can you open the drive icon and "look around at the folders and files inside"?

IF you can access the drive (outside of migration assistant), it's still possible to do a "manual migration".
A little more work and care is involved, but it can be done without too much trouble.

 

[Grumpus]

Have you considered trying disk Utility's First Aid function?

 

[storkinsj]

A few comments on this.

I used carbon copy cloner with legacy boot assistent to make a copy of a working ventura system with APFS (non case sensitive) that had a data partition that first aid could not fix. And thanks apple for screwing over Micromat and Alsoft with the disk specification "that will not be mentioned". The same vendors that kept people from buying windows due to Apple's poor ability to craft a reliable filesystem.

It seemed to be a good copy, although I was not able to boot from it. No errors creating it. This is ok because my intention was only to reformat the source drive and use time machine to restore from carbon copy cloner.

After reinstalling the OS on the first drive, I got this error message when attempting to restore from a fresh CCC backup that had no errors when creating it.

So it would be REALLY interesting to see exactly when migration assistant is making this judgement call about the drive being corrupt. That would give us a way to remedy it and get out of some truly productivity halting experiences on MacOS.

FWIW I knew I could not count on that and also made a time machine backup I'm restoring from. However that process is extremely slow and I expect it to take a day or so. These days using MacOS is all about building safety nets. As far as I can tell my drives are healthy and the issues I'm hitting should not have happened. Bombich's warnings about other filesystem issues with Ventura is telling.