Migrate Existing Mac to VM

[pottmi]

I would like to migrate an existing OSX 10.9.5 machine to a 10.9.5 Guest VM running on a 10.10.1 host.

My situation is:
I own a 10.9.5 MBP that I use everyday.  I have development tools on the machine that I am not sure work on Yosemite.

I bought a new MBP that runs 10.10.1.

I would like to migrate the old machine en-masse to as a guest machine, then I can migrate piecemeal off of the VM onto the native machine.

I have tried several things, but this seemed to get me the farthest:

1) Build a simple guest machine using "Install OS X Mavericks.app".

2) Boot that VM using safe mode.

3) Connect my USB based time machine backup.

4) Start OSX migration assistant (not VMWare migration assistant).

5) chose to migrate from time machine.

6) wait.

I have not been successful.  Something goes wrong each time:

1) Sometimes the USB drive is not visible.

  - to fix this I go to disk utility and repair the disk.

2) Sometimes migration assistant will not see the USB drive despite it being clearly mounted.

  - at this point I just back out of migration assistant and reboot the machine.

3) One time migration assistant locked up.

  - I did a shutdown from VMWare menu.

4) Several times the Migration Assistant stopped running and the machine reverted to a login screen.

   - I put a marker in the syslogs before I started MA and after it stopped; I saved the logs.

I am a bit frustrated with #1 and #2 because the USB drive does not report any errors while being repaired and it mounts reliably on the host machines.

Regarding #4, before I post my logs I would like some confirmation that this is possible AND I am on the right track.

Apple support politely denied help as soon as I said VMWare.

[ColoradoMarmot]

FWIW, you may find the development tools don't work in a VM since there's no 3d acceleration.

Try using a full bootable clone instead of time machine (I use Carbon Copy Cloner from www.bombich.com).  Time machine can have silent corruption (particularly if you've used in pre 10.8), and doesn't reliably back up the entire machine.    The hard links are much more difficult to navigate than a real clone.

So the process looks like this:

1) Do a full clone, including the recovery partition

2) Boot the full clone and then remove/uninstall any unnecessary files/software.  e.g. delete any virtual machines :-).  Make VERY sure you're booted from the right drive when you do this!

3) Create a clean 10.9.5 VM as you've done.  Make sure you edit the drive to be large enough to hold all the files on the clone.   Stop when prompted to migrate (if you create a user account, you've gone too far).

4) Plug in the clone, and manually connect it to the VM from the VM menu if not prompted.  One hint:  Plug the drive directly into the machine, not via a hub.

5) Run the migration wizard.

That should work.

[pottmi]

1) Regarding:

"if you create a user account, you've gone too far".

I can not find a way around creating an account.  There is no way to by-pass the "Create a Computer Account" screen that I can find.

2) The bootable backup that I created with Carbon Copy Cloner will not mount in the VM.  I got it to mount once and I connected to it with Disk Utility.  Disk Utility reported it as read-only. It would only mount the physical device and not the mount point. I connected to it on the host system and confirmed it is a "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" Format.  On the host system it will mount r/w and will mount both the physical device and the mount point.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Before that step it will prompt you to migrate your information from another mac (if I recall, it has a large finder icon at the top of the screen, then four or five options) - you want to run the wizard during installation, not after the OS is up and running (the latter usually causes all sorts of permission problems).