[Kickaha]

Hey there, trying to migrate my wife from her old PBG4 to a spiffy new MB Air. This is going less than well.

PBG4:
OS X 10.5.mumble (8? 9?)

Air:
OS X 10.6.6

First attempt: WiFi. 6 hrs later, network error. Aborted partway through ~/Library/Caches. Nothing after this in her user directory got transferred.
Second attempt: WiFi: 11 hrs later, network error *with less than one minute remaining*. No mail settings, no calendars, no Safari bookmarks transferred. iTunes looked fine, as did Address Book.
Third attempt: From Time Machine backup of old drive. Less than an hour, looks EXACTLY like the second attempt. None of the mail account settings, calendars, or Safari bookmarks migrated.

I'm wondering if those are not migrated because she has a MobileMe account, and while syncing was set up to manual, it never actually worked for her from the old machine... but it thinks it should sync up with her MobileMe acct for those items?? (I hope this isn't the case, because her iPhone sync is all fscked up between iTunes and MobileMe...)

Anyone seen this before? Googling results in many failures of Migration Asst, but I can't seem to find this particular set of symptoms.

[Dave]

Use a wired network connection?

[FFL]

I've always found the Migration Assistant via networking to be somewhat flakey, and stick with Time Machine backups whenever I can't use Firewire.

I'd repair permissions on the G4 and then update its Time Machine backup (maybe even repair permissions on the backup if you can), then wipe the Air's drive and start over from scratch (if for no other reason, than just the sheer fun of using the Air's mega-cool USB restore drive) and use the Mig. Asst. on the first boot with the Time Machine drive.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by Dave Use a wired network connection?

MBA: No ethernet jack. I could go get the USB->Enet dongle, but, I *do* have the Time Machine backup.

Originally Posted by FFL I've always found the Migration Assistant via networking to be somewhat flakey, and stick with Time Machine backups whenever I can't use Firewire. I'd repair permissions on the G4

Did. Also Disk Utility disk verify which was clean.

and then update its Time Machine backup (maybe even repair permissions on the backup if you can),

Did that too.

then wipe the Air's drive and start over from scratch (if for no other reason, than just the sheer fun of using the Air's mega-cool USB restore drive) and use the Mig. Asst. on the first boot with the Time Machine drive.

Hmm. Haven't tried a full rewipe. Will do, thanks.

With the TM backup migration, the total time was about 25min, as opposed to the WiFi 10+hrs.

[Kickaha]

The full brain wipe did it, thanks FFL. Apparently some phase of the migration wasn't getting triggered because it wasn't a 'clean' migration. Annoying.

But...

1) Holy freaking hell the USB recovery thumbdrive is awesome. Love it. Hope I don't lose it.

2) No option to install iLife '11 with the OS at one pass? Had to Install OS X, migrate, then upgrade iLife '11 over the top. Not horrible, but was hoping for a cleaner start.

3) Glad to get her off of the aging, creaking, 7 year old machine... I've been nervous about the drive going. It's the original, after all.

Funny tidbit: One of the things prompting her to creak open the wallet and upgrade (she's phenomenally cheap - thank god), was that the old beast was rainbow spinning on her regularly and often. It was almost unusable. During the cleanup prior to retriggering the migration process, I found two things: one, /Library/Fonts had over 480 fonts in it. She said they were almost all turned off in FontBook, which they were. I pulled them out of the folder anyway, and set them aside. Secondly, NetNewsWire had a 1.87GB cache of 20k TIFF files that were thumbnails of every article she had ever read, back to 2008. There were over **96,000** of them. That actually took a hell of a long time to erase.

I did those two things, rebooted, and... it's like a brand new machine. Not only usable, but downright *fast* again. I suspect it was the fonts, really. It's so damned fast again that I'm kind of almost, but not really, regretting getting the new machine. Best to be off of the old hardware - the drive is 7 years old, the power cable connector is kinda flaky (pre-MagSafe), and the screen backlight is dimming. Still, it's an amazing feat for the thing to still be going like that, IMO.

So watch your fonts, even if you have them 'off' in FontBook, and keep an eye on ~/Library/Caches/NetNewsWire/TabThumbnails.noindex.