Problems migrating from old Macbook to MBA

[krekar86]

Hi all,

I've been using time machine on my old macbook for the pas years. I recently bought a new MBA and wanted to migrate my old account, with settings and files as they were, to the new unit.

When I started my MBA for the first time I got the setup assistant popping up, asking if I wanted to migrate from something older. For some reason I thought "hey, I can do this later with migration assistant", so I did just that.

Afterwards, however, I found out that this is not entirely unproblematic. Firstly, Migration assistant doesn't "find" or discover the external drive when it's hooked up (even though it's correctly formatted etc – I've read about people having this problem elsewhere, but I haven't' read about any of them finding a solution to the problem).

Secondly, if I were to successfully migrate now, I would have two accounts on my MBA, one with the old stuff and then a new admin account. This is too messy for me to live with.

How can I "reset" my new MBA, so that when I turn it on again it will be "like the first time" I started it? Because if I can do that I can just go with the setup assistant and migrate my original account from old straight away, and I won't have any "double" accounts.. (?)

 

[gmanterry]

The solution is not too difficult.

You did the same thing I did when I got a new MBP a couple of weeks ago. You need to migrate your data during the OS install not after. So you need to make sure you have the correct Time Machine backup ready and then do a clean install of Mountain Lion or Lion. Reformat the drive using Disk Utility before doing the actual install. Near the end of the install it will ask you if you wish to migrate data from another computer or Time Machine. Then do the migration from Time Machine and the new install will be a copy of the Time Machine backup. Easy, but time consuming. Don't forget to do a manual copy/backup of anything you may have added since the older Time Machine backup. You can drag and drop those items later.

 

[krekar86]

Thanks!

I have, however encountered a new problem. When I finally get to choose my Time Machine disk as a place to draw my backup from, I just get the message that the backup is from a too old mac, basically. My old macbook is about five years old and now runs OSX (10.6.8), so I guess that's it.

Is there anything at all to do about this? I'm thinking right now it might just be the least stressful thing to just drag and drop the stuff I want to an external drive and drop it on to my new MBA. And then I'll just have to accept reinstall some programmes and their settings.

Or is there any fast way to avoid this?

 

[krekar86]

Ok, I might have done something incredibly, enormously dumb now.

I decided to just start the MBA from scratch again and then I thought I'd just drag-drop stuff from my external drive to my new and fresh MBA. In the part during the startup/installation-process where you are supposed to register your product or enter your old apple ID if you have one, I did the latter.

Then, at the next step, before it properly opens and I enter the desktop mode, it asks for my password. I enter my password, but it just tells me the password is wrong. If the password it asks for is the one connected to my Apple ID, then I know for a fact that it is not wrong, because it works perfectly well on my old macbook. On any other computer I can log on and off with my Apple ID and my old password, and it works fine, just not when I try logging in on my new MBA. The password hint that the MBA gives me is the same as on my apple ID, but it still doesn't work. I even tried changing the password on my account through another computer, and it still works fine everywhere else.

I can start the mac from the recovery disc, but what am I supposed to do with that? The main drive on my MBA appears to be locked until I enter the password that it asks for. WHAT IS THIS??