It's taking days to migrate Windows XP to storage

I'm trying to migrate my Widows XP to my mac with Parallels Desktop 10 via external storage. I have plenty of room on my external storage and have followed all the instructions, but every try results in Migration will take 1 hour ... Migration will take 3 hours ... Migration will take 8 hours. The last time I tried, I left it running for two days straight and the progress bar was still only around half way and the screen was telling me that Migration will take 13 hours.

Any suggestions?

My PC is an elderly Dell Inspiron laptop and the external storage is a WD terra byte MyBook. The total amount of the transfer is 60 gigs, give or take.

 

Hello SailorJim,

Please do the following:

1) abort the migration process if it is running.
2) open cmd as admin: Start Menu > Accessories > Command Prompt > right click -> Run as Admin
3) Check Windows for errors:

3.1. If you have a Windows XP installation disk -> insert it into CD drive. If you don't have it, please skip this step and do 3.2
type "sfc /scannow" and hit enter, wait until the process ends.
3.2. type "chkdsk /r /f/" and hit enter.
3.3. Agree by hitting Y button.
3.4. Reboot your PC -> checkdisk will be started.
3.5. Once everything is done -> try to migrate one more time.


To note:
If the migration will take the same amount of time, please consider to use another external storage. Probably the root in the device itself.

 

Well, okay ... I did all that.

No change. "Transferring the data - 8 hours and 19 minutes."

So I went out and bought myself a 3 terra gig WD MyBook.

It's running now. "Transferring the data - 13 hours and 25 minutes."

Here's the entire story, maybe it'll help.

I started this a week or so ago. I was tired of using Boot Camp because none of my cherished XP programs would work with Windows 7, which is all I could buy to install. (Try finding XP anymore.) I'd bought Parallels Desktop 8 when I first bought my new Mac, but couldn't get it to work (I forget why ... it might even have been the same problem that I'm having now), but I read about Parallels Desktop 10 coming out, so I decided to try it again.

I bought 10 and installed it on my Mac. I still had Parallels Transport Agent on my old Dell laptop, so I started it up and migrated my XP onto an external drive. It took around an hour, hour and a half. I then migrated XP from the drive onto my Mac (took another hour or so) and ran into a problem as it loaded and tried to boot.

My virtual XP would stop at the choose operating system screen (as it had on my laptop, always giving me the choice between simply going on to XP or running the Recovery system), wait the 30 seconds before automatically heading to XP ... then it would Blue Screen and reboot. The migration stopped right there.

Right. So I killed the migration and, figuring that it had to be that stupid choose operating system screen, I erased the copy from the external drive, adjusted my laptop to bypass that screen, cleaned up some files, deleted some others I didm't want to migrate, downloaded a newer copy of Parallels Transporter Agent, and tried again.

Which brings us to my current situation. Transferring XP to the same drive was taking literally days, so I asked for help.

Now, I've done it all and even bought a new MyBook for the migration, but it's still taking forever. When I started writing this, it was Transferring the data - 13 hours and 25 minutes. Now it reads Transferring the data - 13 hours and 26 minutes.

All suggestions, recommendations, comments, and/or prayers welcome at this point.

 

Same here . I am stuck at 13 hours 32 mins and its been that way for a few hours. But I go on my PC file manager and look at EXT drive and the amount of files transferred are increasing so I can see progress but really really slow.

 

60 GB at USB 1.1 speeds (12 mbps) takes 12.5 hours. At USB 2.0 speeds it takes less than 20 minutes.
(These speeds assume just an overhead of 10% and one big file, copying multiple small files increases the overhead significantly, source: http://techinternets.com/copy_calc)

So I'm guessing the old Dell laptop USB version is 1.1, USB 1.1 is better suited for mice and keyboards, it was not uncommon years ago for PCs to have both USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports, maybe one of the USB ports is 2.0. If the laptop has a Ethernet port I would consider transferring over the LAN to a shared folder, at normal ethernet speeds 60 GB would take less than 2 hours.

Note 1: The external disk is probably USB 2.0 (or even 3.0), but if the interface on the computer is USB 1.1 you will be transferring files at the speed of the lowest version between the two (1.1).

Note 2: Time estimation is a complex subject, why it says 8 hours first and then 13 hours, it depends on the current average speed and how the ETA is calculated, but at USB 1.1 speeds, don't expect less than 12 hours.