SOLVED Transferring Time Machine to new hard drive won't work unless new account name is created.

[Dekinekind]

Hi, I transferred my information from my old hard drive to a SSD. I've done this before in upgrading to a larger hard drive. Every time I do this I have to change my name before it will allow me to complete the transfer. I had three accounts on my hard drive and eliminated one and it caused all kinds of problems. How do I prevent this from happening again and how do I elimate these other accounts without messing up my current programs? Thanks
Additional Info. iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2009), 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, macOS High Sierra version10.13.6

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

How are you transferring the information...manually or using the Migration Assistant?

C

 

[Dekinekind]

Using Time Machine.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hmmm...that may be what is causing the issue.

If you are restoring a user from the Time Machine interface and there is already a user with the same short name, then it will prompt you to change it, so it doesn't conflict. You will then end up with multiple users with the same data.

The proper way of transferring data from one drive to a new drive would be to have a clean install of OS X/macOS on the new drive (same version as the old drive works best), then during setup, follow the prompts to migrate using your Time Machine backup. That way, you will end up with only the user(s) you had on the previous install and no duplicates.

C

 

[Dekinekind]

I will certainly give that a go next time. Thanks for the input. Any idea on how to get rid of the other user name without messing up my current system or am I stuck with it? I can boot to the other user and it opens to a different installed system as well and uses up a lot of my hard drive space.