Mac Forum / General / Hardware / May 2008

I bought a new iMac (obviously Intel and 10.5.3) yesterday and started
up Migration Assistant to move files, settings, etc. from my old iMac
(PPC processor, running 10.4, I think it's 10.4.11) and encountered
really annoying problems.

1. Migration Assistant worked well until it said "less than one minute
remaining" where it stayed for half an hour, during which time I did
some on-line searching (AppleCare was closed). I found a couple of
others with similar behavior, one of whom let it run for 12 hours
before rebooting. Based on that, I decided to quit MA and waited until
this morning to call AppleCare. The tech I talked with had had a
similar problem with his own machine, so I suspect it's more
widespread than the few posts I found would indicate.

The good news: Unlike the poster I found, who decided to reinstall the
system and try again (3 times, he said! without success), the tech
told me that since MA had hung up transferring  my Applications folder
(where it is in the process is indicated in the progress window), that
all my user data had transferred OK, and the only problems would be
with Applications since they are the last to be transferred. I mention
this in case anyone else finds themselves in the situation I was late
last night.

The bad news: What should have been a painless, automated task has
become something very different. One reason I love Macs is how
painless Apple makes it -- woops, I mean made it -- to set up a new
machine.

Some of the problem may be that I was moving from a PPC to an Intel
machine, but that's no excuse for MA not working properly.

2. When I first turned on the new machine, it asks me for a lot of
account information and, naturally, I set up the account with my
preferred name, etc. But then, when MA went into action it told me it
cannot move over my account from the old machine with that same name!
So I had to rename the account being transferred. Not smart on Apple's
part, especially since with all the other mess I then confused the two
accounts and got some mail on the new machine in the account where it
didn't belong (with my usual name!). On top of everything else, Mail's
import feature wouldn't work to bring those messages into the proper
account (with an unusual name due to MA's requiring I rename it). This
was in spite of half an hour on the phone with AppleCare, trying
several different options. The tech was going to escalate to a
supervisor, but I decided it wasn't worth it for about 20 messages.

I'll also post the suggested changes to Apple Feedback, per the techs'
suggestions.