Troubleshoot Migration Assistant used internally to consolidate two SSDs?

Question

Hi,
I'm on a Macbook Pro Mid-2010, where I swapped out the optical drive for an extra disk. Now I have two SSDs, one 256GB with my OS and applications, and one 1TB with my user folder and media and everything else.
I aim to consolidate everything onto the big 1TB SSD. I backed up with Time Machine, then booted into Recovery, and installed Yosemite onto the 1TB SSD. Then, I think it automatically goes into Migration Assistant, so I just set that to start (Applications and the rest) going from the SSD which previously ran OS X. It went to a screen that says "Transferring Your Information", with the blue time bar underneath. That loaded to completion pretty quickly. But now, it's just sitting on this screen and still says "Starting up..." above the blue bar. It's been like that for about 20 hours. Anyone experienced this? Should I keep waiting or did this process freeze perhaps? The mouse cursor still moves on the screen, so it's not completely frozen anyway.
It seems it should be relatively quick since it's transferring internally from hard drive to hard drive, where I thought the throughput would be even better than thunderbolt. Is it possible Migration Assistant is just somehow doing it over WiFi anyway because it doesn't know any better?
Thanks!

Answer 1

The easiest at this point would be to start over - use recovery (Command + R keys at boot up) to connect to Apple's servers (be patient - takes a while). Once you see the Utilities screen, choose Disk Utility to erase the drive. When done, choose to reinstall OS X. Now, when you get to the screen asking if you want anything moved over, then in your case, I'd say no at this point. Once you set up your iMac which will include you establishing your own Apple ID/password, you can then selectively port over files and such. You can use Migration Assistant in the Applications folder at that point (FWIW, you used Setup Assistant at the beginning?) - the annoying problem with that is that it will move stuff over using your old ID so you'll wind up with a lot of duplicates which then need to be sorted. That's one way, the other is that you move only the files you need (not involving Migration Assistant). Or, backup your files on an external drive and then move them back over once you have everything else reinstalled.
Please note: anything at all downloaded from the app store is tied to Apple ID used to obtain it forever and is not transferable, so if there are any applications, OS updates, or anything else involved, you will need to re-download or re-purchase using your own Apple ID.