Migration Assistant completely broken on Yosemite?

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro with a 500GB SDD. It has been backed up on a regular basis to two different external disks - one is a 4TB Thunderbolt HDD, the other a 4TB WD Black drive connected via a USB 3.0 Thermaltek dock.

I have purchased a new (2015) MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD, and wanted to migrate my 2 years worth of configuration, customization, apps, and data files. Everything I have tried has been a complete and utter failure, and I cannot figure what I have done wrong. At the end of each round, I rebooted the 2015 Macbook Pro, went into Internet Recovery, wiped the disk and reinstalled OS X Yosemite. This took about 2 hours to complete each time.

Round 1: First, I attempted to do Migration Assistant from the Thunderbolt HDD to the new Macbook Pro. Everything seemed to go well enough, until the "Transferring your Applications folder" screen got down to 3 minutes. At that point, it began to climb...and climb...and climb. After ~72 full hours of Migration Assistant, it was at "128 hours and 54 minutes remaining." I figured, at this point, that something was wrong.

Round 2: I thought perhaps there was something wrong with the Thunderbolt HDD. I plugged it into my 2013 MBP and did verify disk / verify permissions. Everything was reported as OK. I re-connected it to the 2015 MBP and started Migration Assistant again. After ~48 hours of Migration Assistant, it was at "63 hours and 12 minutes remaining", and again was only going up - never came down at all once it started climbing.

Round 3: OK, there must be something wrong with the Thunderbolt drive. Verified the external USB caddy drive, everything checks out OK on it. It's been a few days, so I do one last Time Machine to the USB drive to make sure it's the latest and greatest going over to my new machine. Same symptom - around 5-10 minutes remaining, the number starts going up into the stratosphere. Trying to be patient, I again give it 70+ hours..."106 hours and 49 minutes remaining." (As an interesting side note, I checked several times in the last few hours and each time found it interesting that the external drive was NOT spinning at all...)

Round 4: OK, something is wrong with the Time Machine setup. Screw it, let's go machine to machine. Connect 2013 MBP to 2015 MBP over Thunderbolt, start Migration Assistant on both. They refuse to see each other. Fine. Let's try Ethernet.

Round 5: Buy a 1GB Ethernet switch to isolate the two machines, and plug in each using Cat 6e that has been successfully tested to route at least 923Mbps. After ~24 hours and "18 hours and 26 minutes remaining," I give up.

Round 6: Back to Thunderbolt. This time, we'll put the 2013 MBP in Target Disk Mode. OK, they see each other fine, now. ~24 hours, "19 hours and 9 minutes remaining." #$()$%$()!!!!

Round 7: Maybe it's the 2015 MBP. Go to my 2013 iMac, put it in Migration Assistant mode, put the 2013 MBP in "Target Disk Mode" via Thunderbolt cable. Everything connects. ~24 hours, "16 hours and 33 minutes remaining."

At this point, I have spent nearly two full weeks trying to do ANY kind of migration using Apple's "Migration Assistant", and it has been nothing but failure after failure after failure. I could repeat all these experiments with the iMac and the various devices, but a sneaking suspicion has started to form in the back of my mind. So I wipe both the iMac and the 2015 MBP; I do a bare minimum setup of Yosemite on the 2015 MBP, creating just my user account and installing Google Chrome, letting it sync my bookmarks and such. I connect them via Thunderbolt, boot the 2015 MBP in Target Disk Mode, and do Migration Assistant on the (now completely clean) iMac.

It has been 13 hours. Migration Assistant says "6 hours and 43 minutes remaining."

Things that have been checked:

• Verify Disk
• Verify Permissions
• No OS X updates available for any of the three machines
• All cables used have been tested in other use-cases and worked fine (saved files, copied files from one computer to the other, etc.)

Is this tool just completely broken, or am I missing something? Is there some kind of "debug mode" I can put it into where I can see what it is hanging on? Is there a different tool that anyone can recommend that would allow me to perform this kind of migration?

Solution 1:

Ok I just got a new MBPr 15 and had this problem too. Fresh migration didn't work. If I skipped migrating and used migration assistant later that did work but isnt really a full copy.

Here is what worked for me. Boot up the new computer into recover mode. So boot and hold 'r'. In recovery mode try using restore from time machine backup. That took maybe 2 hours but worked.

Solution 2:

Ok, I have actually had this problem a lot as I'm the IT guy at a company that uses Macs and I could never figure out what it was but just found the answer: it's the Thunderbolt Bridge

On the computer you're migrating from, plug the Thunderbolt cable in. Then go to System Preferences>Network and make sure that there is a network interface called Thunderbolt Bridge. If there isn't, hit the plus sign in the lower left corner and add one.

Now, go into Migration Assistant or Target Disk mode on that machine and go into Migration Assistant on the new machine. The new machine should find the old disk and be able to migrate appropriately.