Creating new account on Lion iMac using Migration Assistant

[sandman42]

Some friends of mine have a G4 Macbook and a new iMac, running Lion. They want to create a new user account on the iMac (in addition to the existing account the computer was set up with) and then "migrate" the user data from the old Macbook into the new account, without affecting the existing account on the iMac. Will Migration Assistant do that?

In other words, they want to switch from having two computers to having two accounts on one computer (retiring the old Macbook). I want to know if Migration Assistant can be used to set up a new account on an existing computer, rather than setting up a new computer as a whole. It looks like Migration Assistant expects to write to the target computer at a higher level, importing Users, Settings, Applications, etc.

The other alternative would be to put the source computer in Target Disk Mode and just selectively import the data we want from it, but it would be nice if we could just turn Migration Assistant loose on it.

(We know how initiate target disk mode and connect the computers, etc, this is really just a question about configuring Migration Assistant).

 

[DisMyMac]

I am having the opposite problem - when I migrated (iMac w/ Snow Leopard to Mini w/Lion), it made a new account instead of integrating everything to the admin user.

A good explanation would help both of us.

 

[DisMyMac]

In answer to the OP, Migration Assistant should do what you want.

For my issue, someone at Apple support suggested simply changing the new account to "admin", then deleting the primary admin account (I didn't know that was possible!). I will try it and report if I have any problems.