Women in Technology

Article:		Tiger's Powerful Migration Assistant
Subject:		Freeze during migration
Date:		2007-08-26 18:27:41
From:		cmsimmers
Response to: Freeze during migration
I'm having exactly the same issue, and I can't find anything else onine with information about this problem. The firewire symbol on the "source" machine freezes, and the Migration Assistant on the "destination" machine just stops at "XXX minutes remaining". I've attempted to complete the migration several times, and the amount of time remaining has varied. I've also upgraded the source machine to 10.4 to see if that would help, and there's no change. I've run Disk Utility on the source machine, and no change. In my case I have a large iTunes library (>30 gigs), and a large amount of pictures, both in iPhoto, and on the disk drive. Anyone else having this problem, or have a possible solution?

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Freeze during migration
  2008-05-11 00:12:50  DaveInKC [View]
  
  
  Success! I placed the old (source) machine in target disk mode and used Retrospect to make a duplicate of it into a file on the new machine. Be sure to use "get info" to uncheck the "ignore permissions" box on the old machine's disk before you duplicate it. Retrospect will place a duplicate of the disk in a folder on the new machine. Next, use disk utility to make a disk image from the folder. With this disk image on the new machine that you want to migrate to you double click the image so that the disk mounts onto the desk top. Once mounted on the desktop, Migration Assistant will recognize it as a disk volume when you use the option to "migrate from another volume on this machine". The migration process is long and migration assistant sat at the "less than a minute" remaining point for about 40 minutes, but it completed successfully and everything transferred and worked.
  
  It seems that the migration assistant has a problem with transferring really large files over the firewire. I had a couple of drive images from earlier versions of Virtual PC and an 8 gig Entourage database that appeared to be the problem with the initial attempts to migrate with setup assistant and migration assistant. This appears to be due to the program timing out and returning an error that the network was not responding while attempting to transfer the large files.

• Freeze during migration
  2008-05-08 19:44:29  DaveInKC [View]
  
  
  Same problem here. Brand new out of the box MacBook Pro. The geniuses at the genius bar had no helpful advise other than to blame it on unspecified "hardware problems" in the source machine. I pulled the drive from the source machine and tried to run it in an external enclosure but migration assistant didn't recognize it even though the drive mounted.