Migration

[Phippy]

I'm a newbie to the forum and a relative newbie to the Mac world, I could use some advice.

My question, I need to transfer user data, and any applications that I can, from an older Mac Pro to a new Mac Pro. The old one is running 10.4.1 and the new one is 10.6. The Migration Assistant looked like it would do exactly that, so I fired it up on both machines using an ethernet cable straight machine to machine, with no hub.

Both Macs got a self-assigned IP address on the same network, and Assistant appeared to be transferring fine, there's about 25 gig of data and the counter showed 57 minutes. Things went fine until the timer showed "less than a minute".

Three times in a row it has failed at this point saying that there may be something wrong with my network, the other computer isn't responding. All I can do is reboot.

Any idea why that might have happened? Is there a log I can look at to see the exact error?

Thanks for a great forum and for your time.

 

[Makosuke]

I've occasionally seen a failed import like that, although in my case re-trying usually corrected it. If you did actually mean 10.4.1, rather than 10.4.11, you should probably update the old Mac to the latest version of the OS possible, which might help.

Alternately, if you can get the two Macs to within a few feet of each other physically, you can use a Firewire cable and boot the old one in Target Disk Mode, then use Migration Assistant to transfer data directly. That will almost always work, as it doesn't rely on the old computer sending anything, it just grabs data directly off the hard drive.

 

[satcomer]

Don't Import Network settings. This will bring over the older network drivers. Just re-enter your Network settings manually (System Preferences->Network pane) and rock & roll.

 

[Phippy]

That's an excellent idea of putting the old one in Target mode first, that never occurred to me. On the other hand although they are very close together, I needed a 800/800 firewire cable, and I couldn't find one anywhere, that's why I used ethernet in the first place.

As for updates, I updated both machines before I every started, so I guess it was 10.4.1.1. I've been bitten by that bug in the PC world

 

[Makosuke]

Well, if you can't come up with a FW800 cable but do have a USB external backup drive available (I hope so), you could use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full clone of the old Mac's hard drive to the external, then hook that up to the new Mac and do the Migration from it--that'll work exactly the same as using target disk mode.

Alternately, if you don't have an external you can clone to but do have sufficient disk space, you can use CCC to make a disk image of the old Mac's drive on the old Mac itself. Then copy that disk image over the network, mount it from a temporary account on the new Mac, run Migration Assistant; it should recognize the mounted disk image and offer to migrate from it.

Using the external or target disk mode is going to be quite a bit faster, though, and won't require a temporary dummy account on the new system.