Copy Error in External Hard drive

[Jaishree]

hi there.

I have a Problem in my external hard drive operation. When I try to copy some files from an external hard drive to internal hard drive drive, initially after waiting for a Preparing to copy... operation, It then start coping with a large amount of duration and thus turns very slowly. After copying a some files, it gives me the message that Cannot copy file; Cannot read from the source file or disk.

I cannot solve it on my own without your help.

Please provide some views on it.

[Hardwareman]

Dare I suggest ntfs is not supported Filesystem in thinstation.

Try a 23GB fat32 or maybe a ext2 partition.

[Maxforu]

Try erasing the drive when connected through Disk Utility, go to partitions and select one partition and format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and see if SuperDuper will copy to it, and you should then be able to copy back.

[Killen]

I only suggested that because I faced the same problem when copying some large files to/from a DVDRAM. Of course copying files from/to other drives already in my PC is always successful.

When you say "to other drives" what do you mean? Other external drives? Is this on a Windows XP machine? Maybe someone else can offer a suggestion.

[T.J.]

Try creating a folder on the external drive and then copy all the items you are trying to copy to that folder.

I am wondering if you're up against a character count limit or perhaps a character incompatibility between Mac format and, say, something like FAT32. If your files have similar names and a file name is getting truncated or a character is getting changed a different character might it be resulting in duplication?

[Rawko]

A possible explanation is that the drive you are copying from is case-sensitive, but the one you are copying to is not.

So if on the source drive, you have a file called 'Fred' and a file called 'fred', they can happily co-exist. But when you try to copy them to the destination drive, you have copied (or prepared to copy) 'Fred', and then when 'fred' comes up it is regarded as the same name and throws up the error.

It's not going to be easy to deal with this if there are a lot of files. You could try: attempt to copy half the files. If they copy OK, attempt to copy half the remaining file and so on. If you get an error on the first try, try to copy half of the failed files.

Any time you get a success, try copying half the remaining files. Any time you get a failure, try to copy half the failed files. Eventually you will narrow it down to a manageable amount to inspect manually. It's time consuming, but not nearly as much as ploughing through the lot manually.