Migration assistant failing

[drtanz]

I am trying to transfer things from a Macbook Air to a Macbook Pro Retina. I start up Migration assistant on both and proceed with the initial steps, selecting the source laptop from the target Macbook Pro, then after around 10 seconds on the Macbook Pro I get a screen saying "Migration unexpectedly quit. Please try again."

The Macbook air seems oblivious of any issue and continues in a never ending loading stage. Both have all the updates installed. What can be the issue?

The migration is being done over Wi-Fi and the username and password for the user account is the same on both laptops. iCloud is not enabled on either. Not sure if any of those things are relevant.

 

[Fishrrman]

Suggestion:

Do you have an external drive available?

If so, try this:
1. Download CarbonCopyCloner:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
CCC is FREE to download, and FREE to use for the first 30 days.

2. Use CCC to create a cloned backup of the drive on the MBAir.

3. Connect the backup to the new MBPro.

4. Try Migration Assistant again. Any better this time?

 

[BrianBaughn]

The username of the original account on the MacBook Air should NOT already exist on the the MacBook Pro Retina before you use Migration Assistant. You need to create a temporary admin account, delete the "same name" account on the MPR, then do the migration.

 

[drtanz]

Hi Brian, that does not appear to be the case, I removed the user from the MPR and made a new admin one, then tried the whole thing again and it still failed.

I also bought a thunderbolt cable to see if the wifi was the issue, but as i presumed this was not the case. Still having the same issue and apple support has no clue what's happening either.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Yes. It seems Migration Assistant isn't progressing far enough for you to run into the account problem.

You seem to have eliminated networking as the cause, also.

I can't say I've seen this before. Fishrrman didn't say whether his idea was based on experience but what he suggests could work if there's an issue between the two machines or some other "we'll never know" sort of issue.

Another thing you could do with an external drive is a Time Machine backup of the MBA and try to migrate from that.