As a few who’ve migrated (it’s uncommon) and googled transferring files to support applications know, there’s a bug in Migration Assistant in Leopard. If spotlight is on, it’ll get stuck right there VERY commonly. Most posts are forum posts and a few said they had to reformat and reinstall and re migrate, never being successful. The tip to turn off spotlight works, what I did is I added the external firewire drive (the other mac in target disk mode) and the local disk to the spotlight ‘ignore’ folder. And I killed Spotlight (it restarted) and mdworker, but I don’t know if that changed anything. But pretty quickly it moved to the next step, after being stuck for hours on Transferring files to support Applications.
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Tom Sucks 
This was genius! How did you find out?
I read on the apple discussion support boards that it was spotlight so I looked into it. I blogged it for future googlers.
I have this same problem but during setup when I am Transfering information from another mac HD (migration assistant). I can not turn off spotlight or tell it to ignore a disk at that point in the install. Is there a solution for this if your at the end of Leopard setup? Mine gets stuck right at the end after its done everything as far as I can tell.
This was a great help to me – I put my old drive in Spotlight’s “ignore” list while it was hung up, restarted Finder, and after a minute or so the migration continued.
But, it looks my permissions – or something – was not letting me access my old files without Authentification.
So I went into my old drive and set Read and Write privileges for Everyone to r/w – and for the most part it’s worked, but I’m having problems with one application, which is asking me for a serial number.
Is there a way I can now migrate my account/settings/permissions – whatever is needed, to fix this issue?
Just wanted to drop a note on this post and say thanks. We were having this exact problem, and turning off Spotlight indexing during the migration worked.
Arrgghh..I’m in the same boat here. I’ve put the hard drives into pivacy mode in spotlight prefs. But still getting to the end “transferring files to support applications” and it’s still going and going..
What am I doing wrong.??
Thanks guys..
I’m having the same problem with Tiger! How do you turn off Spotlight in the middle (actually the end – tells me less than one minute) of migration? Man I’m having more trouble with new and old Mac in the last year than I did in the previous 15!
Tom doesn’t suck – he saved my day! Thanks!
I seem to be having the same problem. Unfortunately, I cannot open System Preferences or Finder. Any idea on how I get MA to get unstuck or to get my external on the Spotlight privacy list? If I leave it long enough will Spotlight finish indexing and allow MA to finish?
THANKS!! After hours of hung processes (and no escape) this worked for me (OS 10.6.8 on an 13-inch macbook to a Lion Macbook Pro)…. Why the heck, in January 2012, doesn’t Apple’s Migration “Assistant” turn off spotlight at the source???