Going through all the steps to share and connect would make this post too long, but luckily I already wrote a tutorial on connecting to a Windows shared folder from OS X.(IT Bucket) How to transfer files from old PC to new PC?
Note that if you have large amounts of data you need to transfer, it might be easier to simply use a portable hard drive, flash drive or network attached storage device. You have to create a shared folder on your Windows machine and then connect to it from your Mac. If you want to manually transfer data without Migration Assistant, you can do so, but it requires a bit more work. If you need to run a Windows only app on your Mac, you can read my previous post on different programs you can use to run Windows on Mac. Most applications have a PC and Mac version, such as Office and Adobe. It’s also worth noting that Migration Assistant cannot help you transfer any applications from PC to Mac for obvious reasons. Once you restart your Mac, you’ll see the new user account and you should see all the data transferred located in that user profile. On the Windows side, you’ll see a Finishing Migration message followed by a message indicating that the transfer was completed successfully. Once completed, you’ll see a Cleaning up message and then a Quit button. It does not modify any settings for your current user account, which is nice. You should know that the Mac will create a new user account and import all the data there. At the bottom, it tells you how much data you selected and how much is available to transfer.Ĭlick Continue and the data transfer will begin. Surprisingly, it also lists out any other hard drives installed on your PC and you can easily copy data from there too. It also tries to find other potentially useful content like contacts, mail, calendars, and bookmarks.
If you go back to your Mac, the code screen should be gone and you should now see a dialog where you can pick the data to transfer.īy default, it selects the common folders like Pictures, Documents, Videos, etc.
Once you click Continue on the PC, it will tell you that the program is ready to transfer data and that you should choose the data on your Mac. If this is the case, then restart the assistant app on the PC and that should fix the problem. Lastly, when you click Continue here, it might flash the code screen for a second and then instantly come back to the screen shown above. Either way, it worked with the different codes. It could have been because I restarted the assistant program on the PC. I clicked Continue on my PC anyway and it worked just fine, but not sure why that happened. Secondly, for some odd reason, on my setup it showed a different code on the PC than the one of the Mac. In this case, quit the assistant on the PC and restart it.
Instead, it might just keep saying Waiting for Mac to connect. Firstly, when you click Continue here, it might show you the code on the Mac, but the code on the PC may never show up. You have to go to the Windows PC and make sure the code is the same.Ī couple of troubleshooting tips here. Once that shows up, you can click Continue and it will show you a security code. It took a few minutes, but eventually it did show my Windows PC. It may also be worth turning off the Windows firewall also if you are running into problems. Make sure your PC and Mac are connected to the same network, otherwise the two computers won’t be able to find each other. Please excuse the bad screenshots since they had to be taken by an external camera.Ĭlick on From a Windows PC and then click Continue. It loads a special program on boot and you’ll see a dialog like the one below. Once you do this and click Continue, your Mac will close all applications and restart. Follow the instructions to turn off the firewall on your Mac. You may get a message stating the firewall is turned on and that you should turn it off. When it opens, go ahead and click Continue. You should see Migration Assistant with the smiley faces. On your Mac, click on the Applications folder and then scroll down to Utilities. Skip down to the Control Panel settings section and follow those instructions.Ĭlick Continue and the migration assistant will tell you to open the same program on your Mac computer. Check out my previous post on how to prevent Windows from restarting after installing updates. This is to ensure the transfer process doesn’t get interrupted by a sudden restart due to updates. Click Continue and you’ll get a message saying that you should disable automatic Windows updates.