midtoad's blog
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Sunday, 24 Sep 2006
File copying problems with USB drives
I've discovered a problem with copying files between two USB drives connected to a PC (or Mac). Simply put, you can't copy large quantities of files from one external USB drive to another. This is extremely frustrating!
—I have my entire music collection on a Western Digital MyBook 250 GB external USB drive (actually, it does Firewire as well, but my MacMini doesn't recognize it - I need to reinitialise my Firewire subsystem). I want to copy all of the files over to another USB drive, a 200 GB Maxtor DiamondMax10 drive in a generic external enclosure. Each time I try to copy the files from one drive to another, only a few or few dozen files get copied before I get an error message from the destination drive and "Cannot copy or create <filename> - Invalid MS-DOS function". After this, Mac OS X no longer recognizes the 2nd drive, and I can't unmount it either. I have to reboot. When I try the same thing on Windows, I get the same error mentioned above, then a dialog box saying that "Delayed Write failed".
A read a http://www.practicalpc.co.uk/computing/windows/xpusbdrive.htm from a British site suggesting that I need to make the partitions on the destination drive logical partitions instead of primary partitions. I used Partition Magic to make the change, and it took 30 hours to do it! Then it failed with an error. 
Next I tried deleting the partitions on the destination drive, and re-creating them, first in Mac OS X and secondly in Windows. Both times: same result.
If you've struggled through all of this, you're probably tending to conclude, like me, that USB drives have a problem in general!
Next, I tried changing external enclosures, giving it a shot with 4 different enclosures. No difference. I also tried copying the files first from the source USB drive to a hard drive and then to the destination USB drive. No difference!
After most of a weekend futzing with this, I pulled out a brand new drive (Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB) and put it in the enclosure. I then hooked it up to my Mac, used RSyncX and asked it to sync source to destination, and went to bed. In the morning, I had a full copy of my files, with zero errors.
My conclusion: some combinations of hardware just don't work, and I have no idea why. I'll re-purpose the 200 GB uncooperative drive by putting it in another computer; it had previously shown no problem when connected via IDE cable. And the new 250 GB drive will now live in a USB enclosure.
• Wrote midtoad at 15:15 (edited 2×, last on 25 Sep 2006) | read 1852× | Add commentComments (4)
I had a problem copying certain files on my external USB-powered 120 GB drive. I deleted the default NTFS partition and created four FAT32 logical drives, and then it worked fine. Thanks for including the link to that British site.
• wrote neeraj kanhere (ip) on 15 Jun 2007, 10:18
I resolved this issue on my 500GB MyBook external disk. I am working with USB interface.
Here's what did not work: Upgrading the USB drivers using latest beta Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 Disabling the driver caching in Windows Moving the disk to another computer (still using USB) Removing/Adding some kernel fixes from Microsoft.
Here's what did work: I borrowed a fire-wire equipment and activated the drive using the fire-wire instead of usb. It worked!
Since the error apeared without any special action (such as new software installation, etc.) I speculated the problem is natural growth of filesystem.
I defragmented the disk and also made sure to move files out of a very large folder containing well over 500 files. This actually resolved the issue - I could go back to working via my USB interface.
Regard. Best of luck to everyone. Don't do chkdsk or fix errors in filesystem while you have this problem. Your information is safe while you don't do this.
Eetay
• wrote Eetay Natan (ip) on 12 Oct 2007, 13:54
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I received the error "Cannot copy <filename>. Not enough space." error message when trying to copy a large (10 GB) file from my hard drive to a MyBook (WDG1U2500).
After a little investigation, I realized that the MyBook partition is formatted with FAT32. FAT32 only allows files of about 4GB.
I reformatted the MyBook partition as NTFS and this solved my problem. If you don't know how to format a partition, the Western Digital support site explains it (support.wdc.com - Answer ID: 1287 and 1053).
A couple of precautions: 1. Make sure to backup everything you want off the MyBook. Formatting will erase all data. 2. NTFS is not compatible with Mac. If you are using the MyBook on both Windows and Mac computers, you have to leave the partition as FAT32 (Answer ID: 291).
• wrote Jarick Rager (ip) on 03 Dec 2006, 08:37