My Mac keeps restarting the initial setup process whenever I try to transfer files onto it?

Question

My mac was having issues opening most of my applications, and the ones that it did open would just give me the spinning beach ball until I force quitted out of them. I brought it in to the genius bar and they ran some tests... but were unable to pinpoint the problem. However, earlier this year, I had the symptoms of a hard drive crash, and I was able to "fix" it by simply removing the hard drive from my computer, blowing on it, and putting it back in. I told the genius this, and she said that my symptoms were such that she wouldn't be surprised if it was the hard drive that was the problem. So I bought a new hard drive and an enclosure.
So then I set my mac up again and reinstall snow leopard, and I am trying to use migration assistant to transfer my files from my old hard drive (which, by the way, never officially crashed and was not turning up any suspicious readings on any of the tests ran on it). Migration assistant refused to work... I would wait for hours while it "calculated" the volume of the files I wanted to transfer... I didn't even get to hit the "transfer" button before MA freezed up, it was as soon as the first screen, the one where I selected which files I wanted to transfer, opened. The "settings" files were the only ones that ever calculated (171 KB), the "users," "applications," and "other files" all seemed to get caught in a loop and would never calculate.
So I decided that maybe MA is the problem and that I should try to transfer my files using set up assistant. I went back to the genius bar to have my mac wiped and snow leopard 10.6.8 downloaded again. This time, when I was going through the set up procedure, I clicked the "transfer files from another volume on this mac" button (whereas last time I ignored this step to use MA), but AGAIN, I am brought to the "calculation" page that fails to calculate. Only this time, it only bothers to calculate for about 45 seconds before the screen blacks out and I am brought to the beginning of the set up process (the "use English for the main language" part). At first, it used to play the start up video too, but now it just brings me to the language screen.
Anyways, I am about ready to tear my eyebrows out. All I want to do is transfer my stupid files. Does anyone know why my mac keeps starting the set-up process over/how I can make set up assistant work??
P.S. when I had my mac set up the second time, I tried copying files to my desktop by dragging them out of the hard drive. THIS would actually calculate how many files it needed to copy over, but within a few minutes, I would get some strange error message saying that something couldn't be copied because some file was open/couldn't be found (I got both kinds). And then the whole process would abort.
Should I put my old hard drive back in my mac and try to do a clone or something on it? I don't really know how this works but I thought it was unneccessary since everything should be on the hard drive...? Will it mess up my new OS install to have the old hard drive put into the computer before it's been set up?
My old hard drive also had all the software updates and was the same OS version as on the new one.

Answer 1

Do you have a backup that you can restore from? Your old hard drive seems to be the problem.