Problem transferring files to external Hard Drive

[Joma]

Hi there

My computer has crashed and I basically cannot do anything with Windows XP.

I've successfully booted it up using Knoppix and can now see all my documents. Before I attempt any repair I've decided to transfer all the essential files to an external Hard Drive connect via USB. I've reformatted the external drive to FAT32. The drive from which I am transferring from is NTFS. I'm assuming it's OK to transfer files from one file system to another ?

I began transferring folders and files across and all seemed to be going well after transferring about 20 GB, however, I now seem unable to transfer certain folders (though there seems to be no problem transferring individual files !). When I atempt the transfer (by copying and pasting the folders) I get the following message:

Could not make folder/media/sdb5/.......followed by the folder name

where sdb5 is the external hard drive.

Whenever, this happens the eternal HD becomes read only and I then have to r click on the desktop icon to attempt to transfer folders again. It seems to be a bit random as to which folders I can transfer !

Please can someone explain what I might be doing wrong here. Why is it not letting me create folders on the external HD with certain files. Do I have to sign on as the root maybe ? Is it anthing to do with transferring files from NTFS to FAT32 ?

Thanks for your help

[Harry Kuhman]

..... Is it anthing to do with transferring files from NTFS to FAT32 ?

I don't know why you withheld the folder name, that makes me wonder if you have come across some issue that will work with NTFS but not FAT (although I don't know what that would be). Generally there is only one issue that I consider in transferring files from NTFS to FAT (which I have done safely many times), FAT has a file size limit of 4 gig minus 1 byte. There is also a 2 gig minus 1 byte limit for files transfered to and from FAT based systems like Win98 when using Windows networking (but bypass Windows networking with a transfer protocol like FTP and you can transfer files up to the FAT limit just fine).

Maybe you have come across some other file system issue, like insanely large file names, excessively deeply nested subdirectories, or offbeat non-alphanumeric characters in a file name where there is some difference in what the two file systems allow. That would be my first guess. Alternately your external drive may just be giving you problems.

Microsoft may have also screwed you by it's sloppy support for LBA addressing. They apparently do the LBA calculation in different ways on different OSs, and this results in improper mapping of some sectors! Strangely, this mapping seems to always work for low sectors, but when the partition size is over 32 gigs the upper sectors can be written to wrong locations and corrupt everything. I know of no fix for this, other than the unpleasant work around of partitioning any drive that is moved between OSs into many small partitions. (I actually first saw this problem in a system that dual booted betwen win95 and win98, and the corruption cut in much more quickly, before the 1 gig barrier was even crossed).

[Joma]

Hi Harry

Thank for your reply. I just withheld the folder names as there are lots of them and I didn't think the actual names of the folders would be relevant.

Anyway, I have now managed to transfer all the folders across, so for anyone else who might have the same problem, all I did, rather than transfer the folders directly to the directory on the external HD, I transferred them into an empty folder on the external HD. For some reason this seemed to work fine, I have no idea why, but it worked, and I have now at least managed to save all the data.

Cheers

[wiangube]

Hi Joma,

Have you installed unlocker to check if there are any process using those folders? I had a similar problem with my Western Digital My Book Premium Edition and that's what I did.