A Macbook/Time Machine/Time Capsule epic - still in progress. Please help!

Question

I'll try and keep this to the point.
I decided to upgrade my Macbook's 160GB Hitachi hard drive to a 500GB Samsung model. I also have a 500GB Time Capsule that has has an ongoing Time Machine backup going back to June 13, 2008.
I figured that I would change out the HD, then use the 'restore' function in Time Machine to bring the system back to where I left it. I figured that's exactly why I purchased Time Capsule in the first place.
The drive installed and formatted (using 'zero fill' to check for drive errors) just fine, and the restore kicked off great. The estimation was for something like 28 hours (for 49GB of data) which was a bit alarming but apparently not unheard of.
A day later, I found it stuck at 71% or so, and checking the install log revealed that I was getting 'error -36' messages for several music and video tracks in iTunes. It literally got stuck for about 8 hours, taking about half an hour to realize that each song was going to be an 'error -36' before moving on to the next one, and so on.
It was clearly never going to finish, at least not this year.
I clicked on stop, clicked to confirm that I was sure...and then it hung. I tried quitting the installer, which also hung, so in the end I was forced to do a hard power down. When I rebooted using the Leopard DVD, I attempted another restore, thinking I'd choose another date from which to restore. This time, however, opening up the Time Capsule drive hung.
OK, Time Capsule's Time Machine backup file is now toast. End of story.
Here's my question: I figure my next step is to figure out whether the HD in Time Capsule is faulty or whether the backup file itself is corrupt. I'm now 'zero fill' erasing the TC's HD. Does this give you a surefire way to tell that the drive is in good condition? If it fails, I guess it's under warranty. If not, I'll start a new backup from scratch (I don't see what else there is to do at this stage, frankly) and try to restore that and see how that goes.
Does anyone know what an 'error -36' is, anyway? Can anyone tell me if I've missed something, or some reason why this may not have worked as well as it was supposed to? Or anything that I should do next that I may not have thought of?
Thanks so much,
Michael.

Answer 1

I will remember to try to repair the TC disk via Disk Utility next time - I didn't even know you could do that until now! Thanks for that. In that case, I agree that I wiped the drive, because it would have been a great opportunity to try out the repair function and see if it could have made it work.
Well, the good news is that I have succeeded with my original intention, which was to replace my internal HD with a larger one, using Time Machine/Time Capsule to bring everything back. It worked perfectly, and I now have a Macbook with a 500GB drive. Awesome! By the way, I can recommend the Samsung drive if anyone is thinking of making the switch. So far, excellent performance, near-silent operation, and loads of storage space - for now!
The solution to the problem became clear once I erased the TC's HD and wanted to start over. My idea was that I would make a complete Time Machine backup, then change out the drive, then restore.
After the erasure, I found that the backup would not start, and everything about the Mac was sluggish! I cycled the power on the Time Capsule, and everything was like new once again. I restarted the backup and without delay, it started backing up - and fast.
Once this completed, I did a restore, and the estimated time was 8 hours. Big improvement from 24! After just 80 mins, it had restored 25% of the system - and this is wirelessly (using 'N')! Clearly, everything had become jammed up and during my previous restore attempt, it pretty much ground to a halt.
So everything is great now. It is possible that I didn't even have file corruption after all, perhaps just a refusal by the system to go any further. I won't know now, but should it happen again, I will power cycle first as well as run repairs on the disk via Disk Utility. I suspect that this is all that was needed.
Thanks for the responses again, and hopefully this post may help someone in the future.