I'm trying to migrate a user account from an old MacBook Pro to a recent, two-year-old iMac.
- MacBook Pro, Mid-2010, High Sierra
- iMac, High Sierra
I'm able to open Migration Assistant on both devices. The device I'm migrating to sees the source device, it totals up the capacity utilization of the accounts I can migrate from. I choose the account on my source device that I want to migrate.
When I'm ready to go, though, Migration Assistant on the target device gives me a message saying that I must supply a Volume Password for an account that is authorized. I thought this was because my source machine used FileVault. I input the password for that account on the source device, but it wouldn't authorize.
Therefore, I decrypted my source machine, meaning I turned off the FileVault protection. It took a couple of days to do that.
Migration Assistant still gets to a point where it requires a Volume Password. I don't know what it means. I've tried every password used by every account on the source and target devices. I'm still blocked from migration.
Best Answer
I resolved the Volume Password issue. I did two things, so I don't know which of the two actions resolved it or if they both played a part together. If you encounter the same Volume Password issue, maybe your scenario will resemble mine and this will help you, too.
This time, I waited until the file size calculation was complete before advancing to the next screen for creating a password for the administrator account I was migrating.
The next screen is where, formerly, Migration Assistant challenged me for a Volume Password. This time, the prompt didn't refer to a "Volume Password," but instead said it needed authentication for an account authorized to create a new user. I realized this meant an account on the target machine. That must have been what it was trying to do at this point before. I still don't know why it didn't work in the former case, because I know that all the passwords I tried included those target machine accounts, too, and they didn't work. This time, instead of challenging for a Volume Password, the screen identified for me the name of an administrator account on the target machine.
I supplied that account's password and the migration began.
So, it works now. As an extra reward for surmounting this surreal problem, while I was fixing my iCloud synchronizations I got the attached error message. Mind you, there is only one iMac on my network. The source for my migration is a MacBook Pro.
This is a perfect OSX koan and it is my single favorite error message ever.