and transferred the contents to the 1TB Samsung (attached via Firewire 800 to the MacMini Server) without any problems. ~ 1.7 MB/s over 802.11g. Initially, Win7 said that the drive might not have been shut down properly, and it ran chkdsk (but didn't fix anything).

Dunno.

But it's working over the network, without changing any filenames or running "dot_clean", and that's good enough for now.

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who sees he is going to have to spend a lot of time messing with Win7 to try to make it look less cartoonish...)

The files on one of the disks that I'm transferring to the MacMini Server (actually, the new 1TB external drive) seem a little cranky.

To review:

1) My 2 previous Winders boxes (each running Win2k on Opteron processors) have been decommissioned. 2 ea 250 GB SATA drives in one, 1 ea 250 GB IDE drive in the other. Winders partitions formatted NTFS.

2) I tried to copy the data on one of the SATA NTFS drives to the MMS using a SATA/USB dock. OS X threw up the Error 36.

3) Used a Win7 Dell laptop with the same dock, and was able to transfer the files on the SATA drive to the MMS over the network.

But the IDE drive has been a little temperamental. Using a different dock connection, I've found at least 3 files where I get infinite seek retries, but chkdsk claims there's nothing wrong with it.

So, I wouldn't go as far as to claim that this "works perfectly" on Winders. But, yeah, I get your point.

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who may try SpinRite on the IDE drive, but later. And who will revisit the SATA/USB dock on the MMS eventually as well.)