iATKOS | United Kingdom

Currently have Monterey running on stock SSD with the help of OCLP. Has worked flawlessly.

In an effort to squeeze some more life out of this machine, going to upgrade to newer NVMe M.2 SSD for quicker read/write speeds.

All data, user account is on internal (original) SSD, as well as in a TimeMachine backup on USB drive.

New drive installed in external case, currently hooked up by USB. Once this drive is setup correctly, I'll swap it into the machine as the internal/main boot drive. Unfortunately there's no cost effective way to use original SSD as an external drive.

Install fresh Sequoia install to new/external SSD was no issue. Booted with lack of WiFi and high resolution, unknown display. Post install patches too care of WiFi. Reboot. Did an NVRAM reset on reboot for the "why not?" factor. After reboot, connected to WiFi, OCLP asked to install, and it downloaded the necessary Metal dependencies. Rebooted after it did its thing. Seemed like a flawless, clean install after that.

I poked around for a bit. The OS got noticeably quicker, as expected, after some usage. Everything I tested worked.

Last step: run migration assistant to copy user from old, internal SSD. Failed. Loops at the end of process.

Same failure if using migration assistant during OS install process.

Same failure when trying Migration Assistant if Revert Root Patches is done on old, internal SSD prior to last boot from it prior to OS install on new external drive, as well as not applying Root Patches after OS install to new external drive before running migration assistant.

Had to give up on Sequoia for now as I don't wish to manually migrate through copy-paste of files and folders.

Cloned internal to external using SuperDuper. Old Monterey OS, now running off of new SSD, swapped as internal drive now.

The only other thing I could think of was to clone the drive, have Monterey running, then actually try and upgrade the OS (no clean install). But that seems bonkers. Just too many versions in-between. If it were natively supported OS's, I'd try it across multiple major versions, but the potential errors when it's unsupported OS's seems like a waste of time.

Anyhoo, the Sequoia Migration Assistant is a known issue. I'm just posting my experience(s) in case it helps anybody to either not waste their time trying what I did, or come up with an alternative and working method to use migration assistant in this scenario.

Cheers.