Migration assistant

[Lowggy]

I bought a 2015 MacBook Air that is running El Capitan. I can not get the migration assistant to work with my PC running Windows 10. I downloaded the proper version of the migration assistant, got my PC running in safe mode with internet on. My MacBook is spinning waiting for the PC to be ready. When I try and run it on the PC it says can not be done in safe mode. When I try in regular mode it says I have to stop mail from running, I stopped all processes but still will not work. Is there another way to get all my photos and files onto my MacBook?

 

[joevt]

Put the PC's hard drive into an external USB or Thunderbolt enclosure?

 

[Lowggy]

Any other help would be appreciated. This is getting very frustrating. All I want is to get my files and especially my photos on my MacBook and get on with using it, it’s been a week. Lots of ideas from utube, etc. but none are that straight forward. Got to the point where MacBook asking for the password of my name account and input it in but nothing happens on the PC.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Going from a Windows 10 computer to a MacBook Air running El Capitan I think I would just turn on file sharing on the Windows machine and access the files with the MBA over the local network. It shouldn't be any mystery where the files are.

If you've got 8GB of RAM in the MBA I'd recommend updating the version of macOS. If it's 4GB I'm not so sure. Anyway, it depends on what you're going to do with it. Some current apps won't run in El Capitan and some older apps won't run in Catalina, Big Sur or Monterey.

 

[Bazza1]

Put the PC's hard drive into an external USB or Thunderbolt enclosure?

If you're only looking at transferring files and photos, I'd just get a portable external drive (HDD or SSD) and copy the files from the Win machine to it. Then copy the files from that to the Mac, to a destination of your choice.

If you felt particularly keen you could format that portable drive (using the Mac's Disk Utility), leaving those files as a 'manual backup' on one partition, and then format the other partition for Mac and use that as a destination for Time Machine.

Just a thought.

 

[Lowggy]

My MacBook Air is a 2015 and I know very little about Macs. I was told if I bought an older one I could use the standard USB cables to connect devices, is that correct?