Migration Assistant crashing (8.1 24" iMac to 27" retina iMac)

[pdxa4]

Looking for assistance here.



Have an older iMac 24" 8.1 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (1TB drive) which is running 10.9.4 .



Just opened the box today to my new iMac 27" 5k retina 3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5 (3TB fusion drive) which is running 10.10



Anyway wanting to use the apple migration assistant to move my valuable mail, itunes, calendar and files and photos (especially my aperture library)



I connected with Ethernet cable, and had migration running ok on both iMac's. Things work fine (confirmation on both sides, code displayed, etc.) until the target iMac is trying to find all the items to migrate. The old iMac is showing that it is transferring, but then the migration assistant crashes on my older iMac and return to the user login screen.



This has happened on a number of occasions, and I tried with Ethernet cable (I had wifi turned off on both imacs) and just over wifi (with the ethernet cable disconnected).



I'm a but frustrated right now, I was hoping to easily get my old files / setup over to my iMac as soon as possible.



Anyone here with a similar issue, or how to best approach this ?



Many thanks.

 

[matreya]

Don't you have a time machine backup of the older iMac?

 

[TheBearman]

Had the exact same issue in the exact same place trying to use migration assistant from a 10.9 to the new 10.10 riMac. I was able to get around this by upgrading my older mac to 10.10 but not sure that's an option for you.

I'd be interested in others experience with this because I'm sure this isn't an option for a lot of folks.

 

[onefish2]

I recently migrated a 2006 Mac Pro running 10.7 to my new 5k iMac using Migration Assistant. It worked flawlessly. It did take almost 10 hours to move almost 2TB of data over.

I took the drive out of the Mac Pro and inserted it into a USB 3 hard drive dock and migrated that way.

May be best to contact Apple since you now have tech support with the new iMac.

 

[UniDoubleU]

If you have an external drive around I would recommend transferring via Time Machine. Probably much more stable. I migrated with Thunderbolt and that's pretty fast.

 

[meagain]

Is Migration Assistant going to do a fresh clean install? (or Setup assistant)? What is the cleanest way to transfer the data to the new machine?