Repair of the Week: Troublesome G3-to-MacBook Migration

Small Dog offers data transfer services from any previous computer, including machines running older versions of Mac OS (even the classic Mac OS) and most any flavor of Windows. Last week I completed a tricky transfer from an iBook G3 that resulted in a MacBook Pro that booted to the Setup Assistant no matter how many times the assistant was completed. I was shocked by this, having never seen anything like it before.

The first step I took was to create a throw-away user account with the Setup Assistant. After completing the assistant, I went into the Accounts preference pane and selected Automatic login to this new account. A restart revealed this trick didn’t work—it seemed too easy to be a fix, anyway.

I restarted into single user mode by holding down Command-S immediately after the startup chime and removed the .AppleSetupDone file from /var/db. I knew that I’d have to create yet another throw-away account, but after a restart, the problem persisted.

At this point I chose to bomb the problem by reinstalling the operating system from the system disks that came with the new machine. I chose the Archive and Install option, which is nondestructive in that user files and applications are unaffected; only the core system files are replaced with this option. The bombs weren’t big enough.

At a loss, I resigned to wipe the machine clean and re-migrate the user’s data from the iBook. The faithful old hard drive did complain a bit when I put it into Target Disk mode and began the migration, but it held out through the entire transfer. I chose to migrate everything from the iBook user data, preferences and applications. I rebooted afterwards only to see the same behavior. Defeated and worried that the iBook hard drive wouldn’t survive another migration, I backed up the new MacBook Pro and did an Erase and Install.

This time I opted only to transfer the user account from the backup, not any system files, preferences or settings. Thankfully, the computer booted properly into the user account, but our customer had to reinstall some of his applications from the original disks.

After all that, I honestly can’t say what was causing the issue. Both the customer and I are happy with the results, though it bugs me that I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. Tech Tails readers will certainly be the first to hear the solution if I find one down the road!