Migration Assistant spins a wheel

Just received back a repaired imac g5 (version A) with 10.4.11 installed on a "wiped" HD.
I have an external drive with a clone of my imac before the repair. It was made with Prosoft Data Backup 3 with a Mac OS 10.3.9, and is FW bootable. I have tried to use Migration Assistant to transfer from this external drive to the "new" mac but keep getting hung at the first step : " Pick users to transfer..." just get a spinning wheel. Appreciate any help!

Thank You! Checked my ownership on the external drive files and they were my "old" computer name; the "new" one has "system" as the owner of all the files. I assume I should change the external drive clone ownerships to "system"? Will try this and see if it works...

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HT2518 Migration assistant can't find my external drive - I ran the disk utility on it and it checked out. What can I do - I am trying to transfer PC files to my new MacBook Pro. Thanks

Hi,
Wonder if someone has a suggestion for getting Migration assistant to recognize my external drive so that I can transfer some PC files from it to my MacBook Pro? I have been opening files in the drive with the Mac without a problem and I ran the diagnostics utility and the drive verified. Still, migration assistant spins and spins without finding anything. There's a lot of files and doing it manually with take days.
Thanks!

Personally I have always used the manual method for moving my files over to a new iMac and never use Migration Assistant.
Go to the Apple drop down menu and select Force Quit.. and if Migration Assistant has failed, force quit it and try re-launching it again from your Applications Utility folder.

Help! Macbook Pro stuck with the spinning wheel after Migration Assistant froze.

I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both running OSX (latest version). I was trying to the do the Migration Assistant and it froze on the Macbook Pro and I can't even shut off my laptop. Any tips would be wonderful!!

If it was purchased brand new then it's running a version of Lion, so to reinstall Lion:
Reinstalling Lion Without Erasing the Drive
Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.

Migration assistant on source mac never spins forever

I have one mac that's running 10.6.8 and another that's running 10.10. I am trying to use migration assistant to transfer files from the old mac to the new one. On the 10.10 machine, I can run through migration assistant, it sees the source/old mac, and it displays the 6 digit code I need to type in.
However, on the old mac, once I get to searching for other computers, it just spins forever. It never finds the new mac.
Both machines are connected to the LAN via wired connections. Both can definitely see each other normally. I tried turning off the firewalls on both macs and it didn't help. I also tried a direct ethernet connection between the two machines and that didn't help either.
Is it even possible to migrate from 10.6.8 to 10.10?
My next step will be to carbon copy clone the old mac's disk and try to do a startup disk migration to the new mac.
Any other hints would be greatly appreciated!

Pointing migration assistant at a cloned boot disk of the 10.6 machine does work.

HT4889 Am I wrong or does Migration Assistant not work in Mountain Lion (10.8.2) when migrating from a PowerPC running Tiger (10.4.11)? Apple really needs to get on the ball or face losing people buying their new desktop products.

The title alone speaks to my frustration about this issue.
Used the process that was recommended by Apple to migrate from my "Lampshade" iMac (PPC running 10.4.11) to the new iMac (Intel running 10.8.2) and I got bupkiss...
Just a spinning wheel (not beachball) and no drive recognized using Migration Assistant for both nor when using Target Mode on the iMac running 10.4.11 and Migration Assistant on the iMac running 10.8.2. Which is ironic, or more accurately oxymoronic, since the iMac in Target Mode (10.4.11) is recognized on the desktop of the iMac running 10.8.2 but not in the Migration Assistant. And before you can misdiagnose..it is not the Thunderbolt connection since I have the Apple recommended Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter and also used the Firewire 400 to 800 cable to expedite the transfer.
On a personal note...
I'm not bashing Apple for this...they are "head and shoulders" above the competition in what they do but I've been burned a few times so I feel I can share a small bit of loyal customer advice...I understand your iOS and mobile products hold huge sway in company focus and market-share but I find it a tad unwise to slack on the desktop applications. I don't recall any app for the iPhone/iPad family being made on the iPhone/iPad...only from desktop applications if I recall correctly. And how can I clearly "Move my Mac even further ahead" as your marketing states when I can't even migrate my files from my old Mac to my new one in a simple fashion as per your instructions?
I thank anyone in advance with an answer or even a workaround for this issue and please have a great day.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4889
Migration from Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger to OS X Lion
Migration from Mac OS X v10.4 computers to OS X Lion over your Wi-Fi or a wired network is not supported. However, if both Macs are equipped with a FireWire port, you can use Target Disk Mode to transfer your data:
Verify that both Macs are equipped with a FireWire port. Note that different model Macs may have different FireWire connectors, which will require an appropriate cable, such as FireWire 400 to FireWire 800.
On the Mac you want to transfer data from, Restart, and immediately hold the T key.
Wait for the FireWire logo to appear on the screen. If it does not, restart and try again.
Connect both Macs via the FireWire cable.
On the Mac you want to transfer data to, Open the Migration Assistant application.
Select the option "From another Mac, PC, Time Machine backup, or other disk" and click Continue.
Select the option "From a Time Machine backup or other disk" and click Continue.
Select your other Mac's volume, such as "Macintosh HD", from the list, and click Cont
EDIT: Actually I realize you did follow these directions and if your drive is seen on the new Mac it should work. You're entitled to free Apple support with the new purchase, I'd give them a call.

After Restoring with Migration Assistant internet accounts are not working properly

Hello!
My Macbook Pro's HDD fried a week ago, so I swapped it for a new one. I had a backup from about 30mins before the issue happened, so I thought everything would go fine with Time Machine. Well, not quite. After installing Mac OS X Mavericks from the Disk Utility and telling the system to apply the latest backup on Migration Assistant during the installation, everything started up the way I left it, but several problems showed up and I have been trying to troubleshoot them.
Issues:
1. I used to have Facebook, Twitter and two Gmail accounts logged via the Internet Accounts preferences. Used the gmail accounts for notes, contacts and calendars. Now, they all show up on the menu, but when I click on any of them it tells me they aren't connected and asks me for their password. When I put it down, it gives me an "Unable to verify account" message. If I delete the accounts and try to reinsert them, I get the same message. What's even more weird: When I restart, they are all there again.
2. Notes doesn't update properly. It shows me all the notes up until like 4 weeks ago, and whenever I even click on the app's window, it tells me it can't connect to Gmail and asks me for its password again. Several other apps that require syncing, like Calendar, have the same issue.
Troubleshooting attempts:
1. It's not a problem with these accounts, as I've been able to sync them no problem if I create a new user. But I had some serious work being done and I don't really want to get a fresh start.
2. I tried doing a clean install and when the Migration Assistant showed up I asked to transfer everything except personal documents and data. It worked, but I lost all my personal files that are not on dropbox (not many, but there were a few important things). Also the wifi didn't connect at all, kept saying it was self assigning an IP or whatever. This did not happen before.
3. Not using migration assistant at all, but restarting the system and restoring a time machine backup, even an earlier one from that same day. Mac gets stuck on spinning wheel during boot :/
This killed my weekend's productivity already, as each clean install and time machine restoring takes 3hrs+. I don't know what to do at this point.
Macbook Pro, Early 2011, 13". Old HDD 320gb, new one 500gb. OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 (the backup is from 10.9.3)

ragob66,
Welcome to the Apple discussions!
Try this:
*Accessing Time Machine Backups From Another User Account or Computer*
Yes, you can do this using the Time Machine interface.
Attach the drive containing the TM backups to your computer.
Control-click the TM icon in the dock and select "Browse Other Time Machine Disks...".
Highlight the desired disk and click “Use Selected Disk”. This will now allow you to browse those TM backups via the ‘time travel’ window. From here you can restore what files you need access to. Bear in mind that any files moved will have the permissions of that previous user account. Thus you may be prompted for the user name and password of that previous account. However, once verified you should be able to adjust “Sharing & Permissions” in the files “Get Info” window.
Let us know if this resolved your issue.
Glenn

Migration Assistant can't find my hard drive - can you help?

Hi, I've just bought a new MacBook Pro (Lion) as my 6 year old iMac (Snow Leopard) has died. I wanted to restore my data from my iMac, via my Time Machine back-ups which are stored on a WD MyPassport. When using the migration assistant, I've followed the instructions, but the assistant refuses to see the hard drive and all I get is "Looking for Other Computers" and a spinning wheel. I've done this before when a hard drive went south and it worked really well, but this is not good at all.
Any advice gratefully received. Thanks.

John Brandt wrote:
Setup Assistant never sees the source drive:
Does it show anything at all? The disk should have a yellow icon.
Is the main issue that I am trying to migrate from too old of an OS X version (e.g. 10.4.11)?
I don't think so. I don't have a Mac running Tiger, so couldn't test it, but many folks have done it without a problem.
Have you run Verify Disk or Repair Disk on the old Mac and/or the backups? If there's a directory problem, it may boot the old Mac, but the new one may not recognize it.
If all else fails, you may have to do it manually. Try starting the new Mac normally, logging on as a normal (Admin) user, connect the clone to it, and see if it appears. If so, you should be able to manually copy from the backups via drag & drop.
If so, you'll have to be careful of two things:
User accounts: If the old Mac only has a single account, the first account you set up on the new one should have permission to copy from the backups. If not, either set up a second account on the new Mac and try it, or use Get Info on the backups to grant the user account on the new Mac permission to read the data on the backups.
Special files/folders like Mail and Address Book / Contacts. You can't just copy the files since the structure has changed, but you may be able to import the old mailboxes via File > Import Mailboxes from the Mail menu on the new Mac. Similarly, you may be able to use File > Import in Contacts on the new Mac to import contacts.
(Note: it's late here, and I'll be going to bed soon, but will be back tomorrow.)

Migration assistent and built out time machine hdd

Hi all,
my MacBook Pro got stolen and miraculously my time machine died at the same time. I got out the hard drive and put it in a casing with firewire.
My problem is: I try to run Migration Assistant on my new MacBook Pro, but when I select "From a Time Machine backup or other disk" it doesn't recognize my external disk and just shows a spinning wheel. The disk does show up in Finder.
I would appreciate if somebody could give me a hint on how I can best solve this, because I really need the backed up data.
Thanks in advance,
Roy

Time Machine uses a different method to manage its backups on a locally-mounted disk as on a network disk.I 'd first try mounting the "sparsebundle" volume on that disk. If that doesn't let Time Machine access the saved data, then see item #18 of the Time Machine FAQ, particularly the third point under "How to".

My iMessage is not signing in after I used the migration assistant

I used the migration assistant to transfer my stuff from my old mac, after I deleted my trash and tried logging on to iMessage. It won't log on and just keeps spinning the wheel. How do I get my mac to work?

I suspect you are not connected to the internet.
Try this - Reset the iPad by holding down on the Sleep and Home buttons at the same time for about 10-15 seconds until the Apple Logo appears - ignore the red slider - let go of the buttons. (This is equivalent to rebooting your computer.) No data/files will be erased. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1430
Then reconnect.
 Cheers, Tom

Migration assistant fails to *find* machine

Very simple, thought I'd fire it up before going to sleep and have a baseline to tune from in the morning. No such luck -- just a band-new 10.5.7 MBP seeking to slurp from a couple year old 10.5.7 Core2Duo iMac. I haven't any FW800 small-port cables, but neither on a dedicated point-to-point ethernet nor on the regular network does migration ***'t get past "looking for other machines" stage after specifying who is sending and who is receiving. I presume this is either a sign I shouldn't bother with it or some completely braindead thing done on my part.

Thanks, Pondini, but the Time Machine disk passes the Disk Utility repairs and only the spinning wheel was visible under both the Setup Assistant and the Migration Assistant.
I now have some good news, and some bad.
First the good news: Lion's Migration Assistant offers the option to copy user (and other) files from the previous OSX disk, not just the Time Machine disk. If this option was already in Snow Leopard, then I missed it.
Now the bad news..
I spent several hours reading (Pondini's and others') suggestions to ensure that my Time Machine is as seamless as possible, namely, for the next backup to be incremental. No luck: all user data are copied. Until the interface of Time Machine stops trying so hard to shield us naive users from making decisions on our own, one idea is to keep the iPod and pictures/video collection backed-up by the straight-forward rsync. Then whether Time Machine is really incremental will not matter, and in any case a spare copy of the documents you wrote by hand is nice in case the some blocks of the disk fail.
But I may have been the one who messed it. In Preferrences \ Time Machine \ Options... I excluded all users except the user "Admin" who restored the user accounts. The idea was to test first whether the mildest user will get a full backup. It may be that Time Machine does not look in the history to see if a given file or set of files already have some copy in the past. If a file does not exist in the very last backup, it is saved to the Time Machine disk.
If you're reading this and are keen on an incremental backup, try this: restore your user accounts using a user Admin, but do not start to backup until after the accounts are restored. Will the backup afterwards be incremental?

Migration Assistant Problem: Old MacBook Pro does not see new MacAir

I have a brand new MacAir (OSX 10.7 and a 4 year old Macbook Pro (OSX 10.6)...trying to use Migration Assistant using Wifi, they're both on my network, but the new MacAir can "see" the old Macbook, but the old Macbook doesn't "see" the new MacAir...the wheel just keeps spinning as it tries to find another computer to migrate to but it just never sees it. What am I doing wrong or what can I do to fix this problem? Thanks!

Sounds like there are two issues:
1. The Migration should start from the "To" computer asking for the stuff from the "From" computer. Sounds like you're doing it the other way.
2. The MacBook Air isn't visible. Correct that by going to System Preferences ---> Sharing on your MacBook Air and see if things look good there. You should at least see a message near the top starting with "Computers on your local network can access your computer ..."

Migration Assistant doesn't see USB Time Machine drive

My dad recently got a new MacBook Pro and wants to restore from his Time Machine backup, stored on a USB drive. He didn't use the Setup Assistant at the start - I'm really not sure why, but anyway...
Now we're looking at Migration Assistant, and it can't find the Time Machine drive. On the 'Select your disk' screen, the wheel just spins and spins. The backup drive is plugged in and mounted. We've checked the drive for errors using Disk Util, and it's fine. Moreover, I tested this with my own MBP and it's backup drive and the same problem occurs.
He also tried booting from the install DVD and using the 'restore' option from the Utilities menu, without success.
Is this because he has started to set up the machine using a user (as admin) with the same account name as the Time Machine backups? This website suggested that maybe that's what happening: http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/Setup.html. Before I take him through a reinstall, etc, I'm hoping to confirm that this is really the problem!

Just create a new user account with a different name. Logout of the current account and log into the new one. Be sure the new account has admin status. You can then try migrating and see if it now works. Also see OS X 10.5- Migration Assistant keeps "looking for other computers".
See User Tips for Time Machine for help with TM problems. Also you can select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu and search for "time machine" to locate articles on how to use TM. See also Mac 101- Time Machine.

Migration assistant - doesn't see Time Machine drive

I'm using a netatalk based Time machine drive which works perfectly from my old 2006 MBP.
I'm trying to use Migration Assistant to restore the data to my new 2010 MBP. Time machine on both macs sees the netatalk drive, however, Migration Assistant does not - there is just an empty window with a spinning progress wheel.
Any ideas?

This seemed to be a problem with mounting the Time Machine sparsebundle from the old MBP.
I solved it by:
1. Launching Disk Utility,
2. Drag sparsebundle into the drive list on the left (takes ages, ignore spinning wheel)
3. select the sparsebundle
4. Click Repair
took a few hours, but now I can mount the image and once mounted manually, Migration Assistant sees it.
Although it makes sense, it's not obvious that you need to mount the disk image manually for Migration Assistant to see it when Time machine sees it as a destination without doing that step.

Migration Assistant Won't Recognize My Backup Drive

Before swapping out my MacBook Core 2 duo Intel 2.0 GHz HDD for a spankin' new Crucial M4 SSD, I backed up everything to my external LaCie drive. After doing a clean install of Snow Leopard and updating it to 10.6.8 to my SSD I tried Migration Assistant (MA) to integrate my backups. I had my LaCie conected via firewire to the MacBook and the partitions on the drive appeared on the desktop. But when I asked MA to open the external drive, which is the middle of the 3 options offered, nothing happens except for the spinning wheel - not the beach ball but the progress wheel. And it never stops. Why can't I access the drive that shows up on the desktop?

I ran Disk Utility and "repaired" the volume that has my backup on it.There was nothing to be repaired. DU set it as a bootable volume. Migration Assistant still doesn't recognize it. Guess I'll just reinstall my old apps and drag and drop files to them.

Migration assistant hanging in Yosemite

My iMac hard drive failed and had to be replaced. When I got the machine back, I was hoping that I would be able to restore from my Time Machine back up on an external hard drive.
I upgraded the new machine to Yosemite (as the previous drive had been) and then restarted, ran software update, restarted again and plugged in the time machine disk. I ran migration assistant and it seemed to work -- for a while. It started saying about 6 hours, then went up to about 10 and came gradually down. For the past two hours it has said 59 minutes left and the bar doesn't seem to be moving. It's probably about the 80% mark.
What should I do? How many hours do I need to wait before I decide the migration has failed, and if that happens, what do I do next?
I want to make sure that whatever I do doesn't start writing any new data to my time machine back up as that disk is my only chance to recover everything on my failed hard drive. Any advice would be very gratefully received.
Many thanks in advance

Managed to transfer the apps over using TimeMachine. Performance is now degraded with wheel spinning every time I try to do anything. What's the best way of doing a totally fresh install and starting again, or is there a better fix?

Migration Assistant spins a wheel

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