[X4U] Migration Assistant hangup?

[Joe Sporleder]

I've got an older MacBook Pro 13" 2.26 Core 2 Duo, running 10.6.8. The MacBook is getting worn out so it is going to go into semi-retirement and I got a refurbished 27" iMac 3.2 Ghz i3 that came with 10.6.4. After a couple of tries of using firewire target mode on the MacBook and Migration Assistant the transfer process would hang up with about 20 minutes left each time - and would stay on that 20 minutes time left for several hours. OK, I thought maybe I had some issues with the drive on the old MacBook, so I ran Disk Utility and it fixed a couple of problems with the hard drive, and I repaired permissions while I was there too. Then tried target disk mode and tried again over Firewire. Still hung up at about 20 minutes. 

So, I split the drive in the iMac into 2 partitions and installed the default 10.6.4 that came with the iMac on the 1st partition, and used Firewire Target Disk Mode and Disk Utility and copied the entire hard drive from the MacBook to the 2nd partition on the iMac. Then told Migration Assistant to migrate everything from the 2nd partition to the main iMac install. It still hung up at about 20 minutes. I was able to boot into the volume on the iMac that originally came from the MacBook, and so far, it is working fine, but I realize that isn't necessarily a good thing because there may be components in software not installed that the iMac specifically needs. So, while I was running the iMac off of the MacBook partition, I decided to look and compare the 2 volumes to find out what wasn't getting copied across. It turns out, its something in the Applications folder from the old MacBook Pro that migration assistant is hanging up on. All of the user account stuff copied over just fine, but most of my non-Apple applications were missing from the incomplete migration.

Have any of you had hangup problems with Migration Assistant, particularly with Applications? Am I OK to use the volume copied over from the MacBook as my iMac boot drive, or should I try to get a fresh install working with my apps and data?

Joe