General Misery

[cavebear2118]

I have a 500GB Mac mini I stopped using in2017 which I will refer name "OLD". Noise problems from the fan (I smoke) and I know that Apple won't repair computers of smokers. So I bought a new 340GB(?) Mac mini which I will name "CURRENT" (didn't realize it had less memory, but it was sufficient as I was only using about 200GB but climbing with all the photos I take).

Last November I decided upgrade the OS to Catalina, assuming that if I didn't like it, I could revert (I have reverted previous OS before). I didn't like it (most of my programs stopped working). And I couldn't revert. I found instructions how to do that, but I couldn't make them work. After weeks of utter frustration, I bought a new Mac mini which I will name NEW and tried to migrate to it. It had High Sierra loaded (and that was the same as my CURRENT one).

After failing several attempts at migration, I finally realized NEW had only 256GB (evidently meant for cloud users). Yeah, I just assumed any newer Mac mini would just have MORE of everything... I'm stupid... I erased the entire drive and returned it.

Moving hardware around, I managed to catch a wine glass with a cable and it spilled on the CURRENT Mac mini. It wouldn't start again. I brought it to The Geek Squad and they couldn't get it to start. Well, they don't do hardware, but at they told me it wasn't just my power cord or something (they actually aren't even allowed to open the cover). A local PC repair shop will do some light hardware work on Macs, and they confirmed the power port and some internal parts were dead but they could pop the HD and copy it to an external drive. But is still has Catalina on it. Though I might retrieve some files. I may have to try that.

So I bought a 1TB Mac mini (which I will name "NEWEST" 2 weeks ago with more everything and more RAM and the same High Sierra OS (I was careful this time) and settled down to use Migration Assistant. Migration Assistant says it will transfer all apps, files, photos, documents, mail, and user settings. Not for ME it won't! It migrates apps but not anything else. No photos, no mail, no documents, and no settings.

So I'm working to import those manually. Photos first because there are 12 years of them. And even then, I discovered I had them in 3 folders. So Im importing the odd 2 albums to the primary one (the things you find when you get into the weeds are amazing). That was done on OLD Mac mini successfully. The collected iPhoto library is about 140GB (I found a usage breakdown of file type but don't recall how I did that).

So I started the NEWEST up and tried iPhoto import. It wants to import. OLD wants to export. It has been "preparing to import" for 12 hours. Activity monitor says it is doing something. "Data read" is 170GB and "Data written" is 142GB and shows now sign of stopping.

I'm actually posting this with the NEWEST (Safari works). And I can limp along with the OLD (with all the photos collected into the primary library and the fan seeming to be quiet lately). So I think I have some time to get the NEWEST Mac mini set up. But I know that OLD fan is going to die soon...

So seriously, if anyone has ANY advice on ANY of these problems, please mention ANYTHING you can suggest on ANY part of my problems. PLEASE feel free. I'm sure I will be fighting with this for days at least.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello.

Smoke and liquid are two of the worst things for computers/electronics, as you found out.

Migration Assistant
-Did it give you any errors during the migration?
-Did you run it during setup, or after you created a user with the same name?

If you haven't added much to the new Mac min, it may be best to erase it and start over. Once High Sierra is installed, use your Time Machine backup during the setup when it prompts you.

C

 

[cavebear2118]

Thanks for the reply. During the migration, I received no error messages. I didn't run it during setup (it said I could do that later and I think "one thing at a time" is usually safer). But everything is still there on the OLD mac mini, so I may try your suggestion of erasing the disc and starting over. Maybe migrating during setup will be more successful.

Well, I finally figured out that Activity Monitor was just accumulating all traffic, not just the photo import, so I can ignore that (after it said it had read 700GB from a 500GB HD, I could tell that wasn't a good measurement of progress). The first photo import on the OLD mac mini did complete after 2 days and asked me if I wanted to copy duplicates. I declined. That got me from 10,000 photos to 17,000. So I set it to importing the "unamed album2", (about 2,000 photos and it has been chugging along for 3 days. I know that isn't right, so I think I will stop it. I may have better luck just copying it to the NEW mac mini so I at least have them there and CAN access them for the present.

But the import function on the OLD mac mini has a striped bar that is usually moving AND the iPhoto menu item "importing photos has a little turning circle (not the spinning beach ball of death) so I'm reluctant to stop it. But maybe it is in some endless loop.

I'Il update this tomorrow...