[Ham-Mac] new iMac problems

[Lee J. Imber (WW2DX)]

Hi John,

Couple things:

1. I have done many >50 <100 migrations over the last year both using Firewire and also the more modern option of ethernet. I have found firewire to be more reliable and faster in my experience.

2. One common issue is if you have a lot of data on the old mac, say 500GB  -> 1TB the migration assistance takes a looong time to index all the data it needs to migrate over and sometimes people think its not working when really it is. It could take more than an hour before your get the "Proceed" button to highlight. You should also have little status icons that are animated in the menu system showing it calculating the disk usage for each chunk of data its looking at. Maybe not waiting long enough?

3. As others have suggested, installing latest version of migration assistant on the old Mac is very important. The MA should also guide you in the firewire process of holding down the "t" key during boot to place the old mac in "Target Disk Mode".

4. In my experience I never had an issue migrating various versions of the OSX, things just copied over and the only issues where going from PPC to Intel and either getting the warning to install rosetta or some older software just not wanting to run. That has been fairly rare though.

5. Of course calling the Apple support is always a good call when all other options run out.

Best of luck with the new Mac!

73 de Lee
WW2DX
MacHamRadio.com



On Jan 22, 2011, at 2:54 PM, John Wiener wrote:

> I have been trying for 2 days to perform a migration from my old iMac  
> to my new one.  The old one is OSX 10.4.11 and the new one is 10.6.4
> Using Migration Assistant  I have the two connected directly by  
> ethernet cable.
> 
> The new (target) iMac gives a number code that I put into the source  
> iMac when prompted.  the source finds the target iMac.  Then it asks  
> again for the number code.
> 
> Then, it starts to search for other computers while the target (new)  
> iMac says it is preparing information.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> John
> AB8O
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