Migration Assistant not working on El Capitan

[jfelix8]

Is anyone else having an issues using Migration Assistant?

Every time I try to use it I get sent back into the log in screen.

[JefferyAnderson]

We are having the exact same problem. I'd love to find a solution as we have about 150 Macs to deploy.

[bainter]

In past OS's, I would image the internal hard drive with Disk Utility and save that to an external drive. Then after formatting the original internal drive and installing a newer OS and applications, I would mount the external drive and mount the image. Migration Assistant would "see" the mounted image and successfully migrate the applications and users from it. With 10.11.1, Migration Assistant fails to see the mounted image. If you restore the image to a hard drive, then mount that drive, then MA sees the drive and migration succeeds.

[jon_heyd]

I am seeing multiple issues with Migration Assistant as well, and the rest of the interwebs have been little to no help. Migration Assistant acts like it wants to start, but then goes back to the login screen. Sometimes, if a computer is used for a day or so (or just sits for a day or so), Migration Assistant will work properly, but this isn't 100% effective. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated; for right now, I'm avoiding El Capitan if I plan to migrate any data.

[jon_heyd]

Just wanted to add: In El Capitan, I'm also unable to do the trick with deleting the AppleSetupDone file to take you back to the initial setup screen; that was my workaround previously when dealing with a stubborn Migration Assistant. Now, deleting that file does nothing...and further mucking about in that folder causes the machine to get stuck in an infinite boot loop of doom.

[chris_hansen]

A loginwindow configuration profile that disabled autologin was the problem, part of our standard office config.
We removed from scope, that profile uninstalled, and Migration Assistant works.

We just encountered this. I found the solution online, don't have the link to give credit (because I'm migrating now ;-)

[McAwesome]

Our problem was that the auto-logout was enabled by one of the recent JSS updates. Turning that back off fixed it on the machines we were having issues with.

[jfelix8]

I found that Migration Assistant only works when the computer is not enrolled in JAMF.

[benbass]

I am running into something similar to @jfelix8 . We are imaging with Casper imaging, and even with just the MDM enroll profile Migration Assistant does not kick off after inputing in an admin user and password. We are just getting dropped back to the login window. If we do not add a management account, then the Migration Assistant does work.

I'm playing around with some additional ways to enroll the computer and still have Migration Assistant work.

[jfelix8]

Is anyone else also getting an issue when creating a new profile on a computer running 10.11?

Whenever we create a new local account on a computer that is already enrolled and running Capitan we experience a really long wait time to sign in.

[benbass]

An update here. It looks like if I have a machine enrolled in Casper, but it hasn't checked in Migration Assistant MAY run. If the machine checks in even once, Migration Assistant will not run and we get dumped back to the login window.

If I don't specify a Management account or do a quick add package, Migration Assistant runs 100% of the time. Time to open a bug with Apple and Jamf I think…

[benbass]

Just to update everyone. Apple closed my bugreport as a duplicate of 23587252 (Open). So if you want to post your own bugs, you can reference this radar.

[nkalister]

I've seen this on 10.11.x with loginwindow configuration profiles. Disabling fast user switching seemed to be the payload that triggered it. Removing that has allowed all my enrolled 10.11 macs to run migration assistant successfully.
Installing any loginwindow config profiles?

[cskj]

I have an open support case with them on this as well.

In my case, having the Login Window configuration profile of "Disable automatic login" was causing it for me.

I do, however, have Enable Fast User Switching enabled in my test profile. So I'd be curious if there are other bad combinations that prevent it from running.

[themacallan]

We've experienced the same issue if our techs enroll before running Migration Assistant. For us the problem wasn't the configuration profile but the MCX for disabling automatic login. A quick MCX flush via Self Service and a restart of the Mac and Migration Assistant works as expected.

[lmrosbro]

Has anyone seen a weird "untitled' drive show up when you run "diskutil list" in terminal. The path to this mounted drive is /var/untitled when the startup disk is Macintosh HD. If I start up off of an external drive it shows as /var/setup and it is unmounted. This disk shows up after we run Migration Assistant. So far we have only found this on El Capitan machines.

[ehendricks]

When using MA from old laptop to new DEP laptop, make sure there is an existing Admin account on the new laptop! DEP-created admin account will not work. Needs to be manually created first. Hope that helps!