Twenty-four hours in it appears I now have a disk migration working. Usually it's a simple task. Unpack the machine and fire up Migration Assistant after going off to make and drink a few cups of coffee and presto the new machine is up and running.

Well that worked for the first many dozens of processors in the collection. This time, however it was not to be so simple. Each time Migration Assistant would run it would exit with the same error message.

Migration Assistant[671] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidReceivePortException', reason: 'connection went invalid while waiting for a reply'

It wasn't just an occasional thing but every time. The odd part is that it didn't matter how I tried the message was the same. Restoring from a Time Capsule, error, from a local backup, error, from another machine via firewire, you guessed it... error. After many attempts it came time to call Apple support. The folks, while courteous and making every attempt to find a solution, were, at the end of the call, as puzzled as I was.

I thought later that I'd try one more thing. The three backups I'd tried all related to the same computer. They were all based on the trusty MacBook Pro. The last ditch effort was to use a backup from another machine. Low and behold that worked.

So the disk and two distinct backups all have the same error-causing problem. After much fiddling and not getting anywhere the fastest solution rapidly became to boot with the MacBook Pro and fire up SuperDuper. Click go, get a coffee and settle down for the start of the weekend.