We keep running into the same two issues here when trying to migrate from old macs to new ones. The migration assistant runs on the new machine, firewire cable goes in, and one of two bad things happens:

1) calculating disk space gets to the /users folder and stalls indefinitely. I believe this is caused by old plists, it only seems to happen when the system being migrated from is at least two versions of mac os earlier. (like trying to go from a 10.4 mac to a new 10.6 mac) We've ran into this so many times that we just upgrade old systems if they're going to be a 2+ step jump before attempting migration. (no problems since that policy)

2) calculation completes and the migration is started, but it get down to the last 2-10 minutes of projected time, and stalls forever. we have one on the front counter now that has been at 6 minutes remaining since last night. this is an equally frustrating issue since there's no way to get any information on the problem, can't get a console window, activity monitor, or terminal window at this stage. I've browsed around and find many many people having this issue, particularly on Apple's forums, and no useful answers other than shotgun maintenance like repairing permissions and running disk utility. These solutions almost never resolve the problem and the posters are dead ending on the problem. Has anyone found anything useful for this issue?

FWIW, I migrated data for a friend under the same conditions and had no problems with Firewire. Ethernet, on the other hand, did stall indefinitely. I'm sorry that I can't help more than that, but for me, at least, the older version didn't seem to be an issue.

finally pulled the fw cable, and got the usual lecture about pulling drives, but it remains at 6 minutes...

In case anyone's interested, it was an io error on the hard drive in the older machine. Not what I'd call a good way to react to the problem, the migration app should pop up a message telling you there's a problem with the older machine's drive if there's an io error or directory problem that causes the process to stop, instead of hanging it till you pull the power cord. There's no other way to stop it.

Thanks for closing this one out with the underlying problem.

Bug report?

I do not recall the precise name of the Migration Tool as given in the All Mesagess log, but it does report errors if it cannot migrate a file. I do not recall if the Console is accessible during the migration.

Ideally, an i/o error would be reported to the user in an alert dialog box, just as improper dismounting of a volume is reported.