Migration Assistant stalls: Solutions and tips

Question

As a long-time Mac user and fairly competent OS X guru, I was not a happy camper when I found myself floundering through the process of migrating my 2007 MacBook Pro with OS X 10.7 to a brand-new MacBook Pro with OS X 10.8 this weekend.  What was even more frustrating than serial freezes of the Migration Assistant was the lack of a clear roadmap to solving the problem.  Fortunately I'm the persistent and methodical type, so I DID solve the problem and figured it was worth taking the time to write up some tips for future sufferers who might feel as though the only solution is to throw up their hands, take both machines to the Mac store, and fork over $99 to have them keep the machines for several days to do what ought to be easy.
1.  Buy a Firewire cable that fits both of your Macs.  2007 and later MacBook Pros have the 9-pin socket as well as a 6-pin socket.  The 9-pin to 9-pin cable works just fine.  I think a 6-pin to 9-pin ought to work but haven't yet tested.
2.  When you first start up your new machine, DO NOT go through the standard migration process.  Just set up a temporary admin account as if it were a new machine that you were not going to migrate.  Don't use your usual account name or the name of any account that's on your old machine -- just set up a temporary account that you can delete later if you don't need it. Oh, and a word to the wise: don't use a stupid password just because this is a temporary account! You might forget to delete that account and leave the whole machine vulnerable in case it got out of your hands.
3.  Once you've got your new machine all booted up, do a Software Update.  OS X 10.8 was installed on my system, but the current version is 10.8.2.  What I didn't know (and no one at the Apple Store told me even after I had problems) was that 10.8.1 contained a fix for Migration Assistant freezes. Why I couldn't learn that by searching the Apple database I haven't the foggiest -- it's the kind of thing that ought to be front and center and well-known by all Apple Geniuses, don't you think?  But now you DO know:  update your machine before running Migration Assistant and you'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration.  BTW, I could not do this through the Apple Store:  10.8.2 requires 10.8.1, so I had to search for the 10.8.1 update, install that one, and then download 10.8.2 and install that, restarting the system after each install. Sooner or later there will be a cumulative update, so if you're reading this sometime in the future it might not be so difficult.  But it's always good policy to get the OS to the current level before trying anything fancy.
4.  Once your software is all updated, turn off wi-fi on both machines.  Migrating via wi-fi seems to be the default, and you could spend many, many hours waiting for that to happen.  Turn off the wi-fi and plug in your Firewire to connect the machines.  Theoretically this process also ought to work by plugging both machines into the same Ethernet router, but I haven't tested that yet either.
5.  Start the Migration Assistant on your new machine. (Just type "Migration" into the Spotlight box and you'll find it).  Tell it that you'd like to migrate "from a Time Machine backup or other hard drive" rather than from another computer. That's not strictly true, but that's what you have to choose to make the Firewire work. Then start the Migration Assistant on the old machine and wait for the new one to find the old one via Firewire.  Duh, that one took me a while to figure out, and I only stumbled across it after the two machines connected via Firewire couldn't find each other and I threw up my hands and connected the old Time Machine backup to the new machine and restarted the process to try to migrate via TIme Machine backup. I hadn't disconnected the Firewire, and the two machines found each other on that connection within seconds. I'm sure Firewire was far faster than doing the same task via USB drive would have been!
6.  Having already had the process stall on me several times, I was cautious about how much I wanted to migrate at a time.  So I first did only "Applications," and then restarted the Migration Assistant to do "Settings," "Users," and finally the rest of my files.  Each one took a while (several hours, with files being an overnight run - I have a LOT of stuff), but the results were just about perfect except for a couple of apps that didn't quite get all re-installed. I imagine that you could do it all in one go if you wanted to -- I'd just been burned too many times to want to try that :-)
7. One other tip: if your migration DOES hang, don't hestitate to CMD-Q and kill it on both machines.  It doesn't hurt a thing although it may leave some partial (and non-functional) accounts hanging around.  I haven't gone back to look for those yet, but eventually I will and I imagine they'll be pretty easy to clean up. And of course the corollary is that you can run the Migration Assistant as many times as you like, even importing apps and users from multiple machines if you like.  Kind of useful if you're consolidating machines.
Hope this helps anyone who has similar problems now or in the future. After Thanksgiving I'm going to try migrating an old iMac running 10.6.8 to a new Mac Mini by connecting them both to the router since I don't have a 6-9 Firewire cable.  I'll pop in to update this posting and we'll all have a bit more generic feedback on the best way to use that Migration Assistant.  Sheesh, maybe the Apple Geniuses will all read this and be able to better advise their customers and keep those loyal folks who have used Macs for many years and are willing to do their own migrating from running into the same brick walls that I managed to find.

Answer 1

It may have completed the migration. Have you logged out and then looked for a new user account to see if your migration was completed?