Having just purchased an Apple MacBook Pro, one of the initial things I wanted to do was install Parallels so that I can run Windows on top of the MacBook Pro.  Given that the laptop is to replace one of my Windows XP machines, it seemed like running Parallels Transporter would be a great thing to do.  Copy the Windows XP system over to the MacBook Pro, make sure it was all happy... and then consign the old system to the recycling process.

However, it didn't work out that great so far.  Everything seemed to work out at first.  I installed the Parallels Transporter Agent on the XP system.  I installed (after purchasing) Parallels on my MacBook Pro.  Then came problem #1 - Transporter on the Mac couldn't find the Transporter Agent running on the network, so the XP PC wasn't listed in the choice of systems I had to choose from.  I tried providing the IP address of the XP system and that still had no luck.  Thankfully, I'm a network geek with plenty of different kinds of cables around, so I simply put a crossover cable between the two of them, manually configured their IP addresses and... ta da... Transporter could see the Transporter Agent!  All looked good.

The migration began but then when the blue progress bar had moved maybe 1/4 of the way across the screen, it stopped suddenly with this error:

During disk(s) migrating an error has occurred.

Nice!  Wonderfully descriptive!  I retried with the same effect.  I then set to work on the XP system... I did "Disk Cleanup", then I defragged... then I defragged again.  Still the same problem. Judging by this thread on the Parallels forums, it seems like it might be some issue with a single file somewhere on the disk.  Now, the curious thing is that when I do the Disk Defrag, it tells me that a file was unable to be defragmented, but doesn't say what the file is!  The box where this is to be indicated is empty!  So perhaps this is the issue... or perhaps not.

Anyone out there have a similar problem with Parallels Transporter?  If so, did you ever get it to work?  (And what did you do?) Thanks!

Tags: apple, macbookpro, parallels, parallelstransporter