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jafd

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 14, 2010
92
234
...which is as follows:

You start the Migration Assistant to bring you the data from another machine. Then you realize that your current method (say, networked) is too slow. So you quit the Migration Assistant, plug the source drive to, say, a Thunderbolt box or in a second caddy so you can enjoy SATA3 speeds, and fire up Migration Assistant again.

But instead of showing you the dialog to select migration source, you see it go immediately to the "Preparing..." stage, and you are stuck with that. No amount of quitting/reopening help.

The solution is simple, but not immediately obvious.

Apple has a track record of making their CLI tools hide in obscure places but making them immensely more robust and capable than their GUI counterparts (remember how you can only make Fusion Drive volumes with diskutil only?). The tool we need now hides deep in the system hierarchy:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SystemMigration.framework/Versions/A/Resources/migrationTool

So you just invoke it (from Terminal, of course):

sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SystemMigration.framework/Versions/A/Resources/migrationTool --resetDaemon


After it finishes, you're good to go.

Hope this would be of help to someone.

P. S. man migrationTool in Yosemite is the most hilarious man page ever.
 
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