MacOS – Migration assistant to specific folder

data transferfile-transferhard drivemacmacos

I have a 290gb of data on my old mac. It won't boot up. I have a firewire cable and am going to transfer the data to my MacBook pro which has 590gb of free space. I want to use migration assistant, but want all the files from my old mac to be put in one specific folder. Is there a way I could do this with migration assistant, because this is only a temporary solution.

Thanks, any help is greatly appreciated

Best Answer

Migration assistant will copy files into expected places on the disk so ~/Library ~/Documents etc and is only meant to be used when installing OSX.

If you want to copy to one directory don't use Migration Assistant. Instead

  1. Install OSX from scratch and create a new user (for ease if you have multiple users create them in the same order as before so that their UIDs match) - or just keep the target running current OSX.
  2. Connect Macs via firewire and boot up old Mac in Target Disk Mode
  3. The old disk is now seen under /Volumes
  4. Copy files onto new disk as you want

If step 2 fails then you need to take the disk out of the old Mac and put iy in a USB or other external disk caddy. Then it might work. If the disk is corrupt then look at disk recovery tools or firms.

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