OS X Server V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Permissions Loop On Transferring Files?

we had an older xserve die on us recently, a g5 system running 10.5. we were able to recover most of the file content we needed off of the server, but not all of it (yet), and not any of the system files itself (the main drive was toast) the problem im having is this... we've been migrating this content over to a newer server running 10.6.8 server. Several of the files we need to get at and modify however were locked via the finder right before the original server went down (we do this to prevent others from editing a live file on the server). now, because the user data for these files was lost (terminal & finder show them as being owned by "unknown") we cannot change ownership of the files to unlock them.so basically, its a permissions loop that we cannot escape from: terminal will not let us chown or chmod the file, because its owner is unknown because the file is locked via finder, it will not let us change the owner.