Migration Assistant stuck on 'Starting up'

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22 points

Migration Assistant stuck on 'Starting up'

I'm setting up my new MacBook Pro, 2020. I'm using 'Migration Assistant' to move stuff over. It now says Starting up, but it's been like that for an hour. How much longer should I wait?

MacBook

Posted on Jan 6, 2021 04:07 PM

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Answer 1

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jaysonng

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40 points

Jan 7, 2021 08:05 PM in response to jaysonng

So I fixed this by cancelling the migration and restarting Migration Assistant with the following conditions

make sure that the username on both the old and new macs are different.
to make transfers faster, i used USB-C cable
not deleting the existing user account on the new mac (during migration assistant process, there’s a step asking if you want to keep or delete the existing user. )

After these steps, transfer started right away - no more long “Starting up”. Whole transfer of about 100gb took less than 2 hours

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Answer 2

pru415 Author

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22 points

Jan 7, 2021 09:48 PM in response to jaysonng

I waited 3 hours. It never finished, and I cancelled. I restarted Migration Assistant, and then only checked 'Home' or something like that. I didn't have the right cable, so it was over Wifi. Took all night, and then it finished, and everything was fine. I didn't change id's or anything. I wanted to ditch some applications that were causing problems for me, so that's why I wanted to exclude applications. I got my music, and photos too, which I wasn't sure I would get; was it part of my user data? Was it on iCloud? Who knows, it got there . I got my documents separately (I googled this, can't remember now what I did).

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Answer 3

jaysonng

Level 1

40 points

Jan 7, 2021 05:39 PM in response to pru415

Im on this too right now. But I’ve been stuck for about 15 hours now.

how long did you wait on yours? Did you eventually finish?

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Migration Assistant stuck on 'Starting up'

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