Migration Assistant crashed new iMac, won't boot

Question

I bought a new i3 iMac and skipped the migration assistant initially. Things were going fantastic, I imported and built a new iTunes library, iPhoto library etc.
It is running 10.6.6.
Then last night I decided to use Migration Assistant to move things from old Intel MacBook (running 10.5.8). As the migration was going to be something like 20-30 GiG's, I unchecked everything except Applications, and a few select folders from each user account (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Movies). Since one account had the same name as the account on my new iMac, I asked Migration Assistant to rename the old account. I then went to sleep.
When I woke up, iMac screen was black and would not wake up from sleep. Old MacBook tells me that the connection was dropped.
I had to depress power button to force shutoff. Upon restart, at the apple boot logo, all I get is a message saying the computer has to be restarted, which appears in multiple languages. There seems to be nothing I can do to get it to boot.
Help?

Answer 1

elvenkind wrote:
I bought a new i3 iMac and skipped the migration assistant initially. Things were going fantastic, I imported and built a new iTunes library, iPhoto library etc.
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
That's likely a complication. You'll now have an extra user account with that stuff in it, and the account(s) you transfer won't have permission to it.
I had to depress power button to force shutoff. Upon restart, at the apple boot logo, all I get is a message saying the computer has to be restarted, which appears in multiple languages. There seems to be nothing I can do to get it to boot.
That's a *kernel panic.*
They are usually caused by hardware problems, but can be software.
Try running this: [Apple Hardware Test: iMac (Mid 2007) and later models|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1883]. Run the Extended tests.
and the (free) Rember, a heavy-duty memory tester, from: http://www.kelleycomputing.net/
If that doesn't help, start with this Apple article: [If “You need to restart your computer” appears|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/8965.html].
Once you get it started, check the transferred user accounts; most likely, the transfer was incomplete, and you'll have to delete the partial accounts and run the Migration again.
If your Apps were only partially transferred, just select them again -- Migration Assistant will just skip any that already exist on the new Mac. The only problem you might have is if it was in the middle of transferring an app when it failed; in that case you may have a partial copy of the app.