I installed a replacement 2.5″ SATA drive in my MacBook yesterday, and connected the old disk via USB to run Apple Migration Assistant and transfer all my stuff over. All went well and in 3 hours I was back up and running.

One big weirdie was with Parallels 3 (this was build 5600) which suddenly couldn’t find any network interfaces and wouldn’t let me put it in Shared Networking Mode. This seems to be because the startup service isn’t “there” any more (AMA didn’t transfer it for some reason), and a reinstall of Parallels over the top didn’t work.

Solution was to deinstall Parallels (use the “Uninstall” script which comes with the download) and then install it again. Worked fine, although it re-IP’d my virtual network interface.

Still, very impressed with the Migration Assistant – it even did the apps I’d forgotten about leaving me with a fully working system in a short space of time.

Edit: Something else that doesn’t transfer properly is the 3G software for the Vodafone 3G dongle. Re-run it and it’ll reinstall the modem and network devices, and set itself up properly.