I spent the past several days trying to get the data moved over from my old PowerBook G4 to a newer one. I had about 60Gig of data (a lot of raw audio) on that, and wasn’t surprised that it didn’t go flawlessly. Apple’s Migration Assistant tool is cool, but the transfer froze not long after it attempted to move my own account over. A friend at Apple suggested it might be file corruption, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. I never actually identified the offending file, but did narrow it down to a folder that had nothing irreplaceable in it, so I deleted that and was able to continue the move.
One thing that I discovered was that creating an archive of a corrupted file or folder containing one fails as well, so I was able to identify where the offending file was by reorganizing the contents of my Documents folder into subfolders, and one by one zipped them. When one failed, I knew that the corrupt file was in there. Further subdivisions helped to identify the last folder, and once it was deleted the transfer went smoothly.
It would have been helpful if Migration Assistant simply skipped the corrupt file and notified me rather than just freezing.
