[danviento]

I recently had a disk03s error on machine's main HD, rendering it useless and unfixable by Disk Utility on another Mac. However, I found some software called Data Rescue II that let me save all of the files off the disk to an external drive.

At this point I could manually insert all of the files which is no easy task considering that some of the saved files aren't readable for some reason and stop batch transfers. That requires one to find exactly where the transfer got stock, in however many layers of subfolders down the file was, finish off that folder, and back out to try again until getting stuck again. Needless to say, it takes days to get all done while multitasking.

I'm wondering if there's a way to have Migration Assistant in Leopard copy over the files. The Assistant does give you the option of choosing "From a Time machine backup or other disk," but my simple folders aren't an available choice. I've found posts on how to get around Time Machine and Aperture not allowing network backups, so I know it is possible to enable capabilities to areas like these that aren't enabled by default.

Please tell me there are a couple terminal commands or methods to spoof the Migration Assistant.

[steve626]

I think you will find that this approach is not going to give you the results you want. The reason is that Migration Assistant tends to want the data to be in specific formats. Migration Assistant also is designed to preserve users and permissions, and my sense from your post is that those entities have not been properly handled in your data recovery program because some files are apparently damaged. Data recovery is good because it gets the files back from a damaged disk, but those files may have lost some attributes or folder structures that Migration Assistant is looking for. Migration Assistant is like a black box and there aren't a lot of options or ways to configure or customize it. Migration Assistant is really designed for Apple file structures and folder hierarchies that are properly preserved, which would be the case for a working computer, clone or Time Machine backup.

Even if Migration Assistant does not work for you, you might have other options. One is to use Spotlight or the File/Find command in the Mac OS to collect files by specific criteria that you specify (it actually has many advanced sorting criteria if you look into it) and then move them en mass in groups like this to the appropriate folders on your new disk. For instance, all mp4 and mp3 files could be collected into one folder and then re-imported into iTunes, things like that. This way you can reduce the manual labor involved. Others may have better ideas for how to go about this.

Another question (I think I know what your answer will be or else you would not have posted here) -- do you have a versioned backup (such as from Retrospect) or a cloned backup (such as from SuperDuper or Apple's own Disk Utility) of your disk? The clones can be used in conjunction Migration Assistant.