Hi Butler Trumpet
Thanks so so much for replying to me!!! It's reassuring to know that these things can take two days or so. It's the not knowing and only seeing the change in how long the migration's going to take that has been v. unsettling.
As you may see I'm a total newbie to this forum. I did manage to time machine the dodgy imac beforehand, so I do have the data safe and sound - only 40 gbs of it in total.
Apple care advised me not to take over the old applications in the Migration, in case those are causing the problems on the old mac. So the Applications box was unticked, the rest were ticked.
This morning (as of now really) it's been 24 hours since I started the migration assistant and now the screen message states it's going to take 5 hours and 45 minutes.
Yesterday at 12.30pm, an hour and a half into migration, it said it wd take 1 hr and 26 mins, then at 1.30pm it said 1 hr and 37 mins. This is the only thing that's changing, and Apple care said so long as this changes, and there is no error message everything is OK (well they said that 20 hours ago).
The blue indicator in the bar is still just one millimetre in, just as it was at the very beginning? Is this normal?
It all started when last thursday someone sent an iworks folder via skype and I had both Iworks 08 and 09 installed. That's when the old machine threw a wobbler.
The conflict in never using the application may have caused the initial freeze. Ultimately the old iMac crashed and only until zapping the PRAM, did the computer finally boot up in Safe Mode. iCal, Mail and Safari were usually open when the freeze or crash occurred. iCal did display duplicate and blank events after restarting. The computer cd be started up but it asked for System account owner but did not allow access despite login details correctly entered, so I booked a Genius Bar appointment and took a bit of plastic with me so that i could buy a new iMac just in case.
A hour at the Genius Bar on Monday resulted in being shown how to transfer data from the old iMac to the new one I wd be buying, in target mode without the migration assistant, and then how to do it in migration assistant with the emphasis being on the latter being better (and easier to a novice like me).
I was also shown how to replace the mail folder within the new library with the old one, so that all emails transfer over by using drag and drop.
The old mac now does start normally though it takes forever and allowed time machine to take a proper back-up without freezing. I did this before commencing the migration. I don't know whether this would still be the case, mind.
I'm also worried about transferring the old ical as it tells us what we're doing with website for the next three months. It took 2 weeks for me to type this up, you see.
Butler Trumpet, what do you mean by 're-imaging your new iMac", and how do I do that?
is there anything I should do instead with the external hard drive seeing it did back up the old mac yesterday? Should I just plug the external hard drive which contains the time machine info from the old mac into the new one, once I restart it? I'm worried that it would have also taken a copy of the corrupt files and applications and I'd be 'infecting' my shiny new iMac.
Since typing this the on-screen message is stating about 7 hours and 16 minutes remaining. The amount keeps increasing not decreasing and the blue part of the horizonal progress bar is still just one millimetre in.
I hope you haven't given you too much information here, I don't know what's relevant so thought it's best to tell you everything
Thank you
Barbican Duck
