Mac – After migration of a user to another Mac (Catalina to Big Sur, Intel to Apple Silicon) via Time Machine backup, user is stuck on login screen

big surmigrationtime-machine

I setup my new MacBook Air M1 from scratch, just adding a new admin account. Then I connected my Time Machine backup disk from my older MacBook Air and used Migration Assistant to transfer my old admin account (which has a different name) to the new Mac.

This went successfully, but after restart I can not login with my migrated account. The password is accepted, but then the Mac is stuck at the login screen with a spinning process indicator and a notification about "Optimizing Your Mac". Nothing else seems to happen until I loose patience and restart.

Safe boot did not help. What can I do?

Best Answer

  1. Login with the original admin account.
  2. Delete the migrated user (say, "Joe User") with the Users & Groups control panel. Choose the option to keep the user folder as it is. It will get renamed from joeuser to joeuser (deleted).
  3. Go to the Users folder on your hard disk and re-rename joeuser (deleted) again to joeuser.
  4. Add "Joe User" again with Users & Groups control panel. Make sure it gets the same user folder name (joeuser) and select the option to use the existing folder when you create it.
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