moving songs to hard drive

January 20, 2008 6:08 PM

I'm trying to copy about 16,00 songs from the desktop of MacBook Pro to a new TrekStor 250 maxi x.u. GB hard drive. It does about 80 mb and then just stops (I can hear the drive sort of shut down). Then it becomes impossible to manipulate the icon. Any ideas? Is it a bum drive? Or are the songs protected in some way?
posted by dearleader to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Try doing the copy from Terminal, and see if you get an error message.
posted by pompomtom at 6:11 PM on January 20, 2008

thanks for the answer... but i'm sheepish to admit i don't know what 'terminal' is? if i do get an error, am i screwed? thanks
posted by dearleader at 6:12 PM on January 20, 2008

Open a finder window, and open the 'Applications' directory. Under the folder 'Utilities', there'll be an application called 'Terminal'. Open that, and you'll get a terminal window and a command prompt.

I'm going to assume that your songs are in folders under 'Music', and your new drive is USB or firewire or something, and not internal. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, at the terminal prompt, type:

ls /volumes

...this should show the name that your new HD is mounted under. Let's say this shows you it's called 'disk1'

then you can go:

cp -r ~/Music/* /volumes/disk1/


which is saying 'recursively copy every file and directory under Music into /volumes/disk1/'


If this craps out like your previous copy, it should give an error message explaining why it has stopped.

(of course, if it doesn't, then we're sweet....)
posted by pompomtom at 6:27 PM on January 20, 2008

Feel free to try that, but I've seen this happen more than once.

Short answer: You have a bum drive.
posted by Mwongozi at 6:33 PM on January 20, 2008

It's been my experience that large data transfers - either one, large file or lots of files in a mass copy - via the Finder to USB storage is just crap on OS X (same goes for Explorer & Windows). I acknowledge that this may not be the experience of everyone and the quality of the target drive setup may be a significant factor (just to avoid a flaming discussion in this thread).

I try to buy all my storage either for use as standalone NAS or ensure it has a firewire port since (and this is just personal bias) storage should be hooked up with firewire or gigE+, period. I suspect this is one reason Apple created Time Capsule instead of figuring out a way to make Time Machine work across the network onto Airport Extreme USB drives (i.e. their tests showed problems with USB drive stability and the AE firmware when used with something as potentially intensive as Time Machine).

Having said that, the Terminal copy solution is something you should investigate and - while it's not exactly safe to take an offer like this - I'd be glad to walk you though it via desktop sharing if you've got Leopard. (I write for "theappleblog.com" if that helps at all.)

If that's not an option (again, taking an offer like that can be dangerous in open forums), then it may be a drive issue. If you have no other data on the drive, go into Disk Utility and completely erase the whole drive. When it comes back, check it for errors and then try the copy again. Make sure it's directly connected to the Mac USB and not via a hub (most USB hubs are crap...not sure if you can tell that I'm not a big USB fan).

Don't get me wrong, USB is fine for kbds, mice, serial emulation, etc. Critical data operations (at least *my* critical data operations): not so much.
posted by hrbrmstr at 7:05 PM on January 20, 2008

In my experience this can also be caused by a bad file. Try copying half. Then the other half. If one does not copy then you know the bad file is somewhere in that half. So divide that half and son until you find the bad file. Oh, don't be surprised when you don't find it. Somewhere in the mojo of copying even a bad file can be copied.
posted by Gungho at 8:12 PM on January 20, 2008

I haven't used OS X (though I regret that this is so!), but I know that Windows has a very obnoxious behavior when you drag-and-drop more than one file: if it comes across a bad file (even just one stinking, lousy bad file), it aborts the whole transfer! This isn't normally a problem, unless you try copying a set of files with some data corruption. I don't know if this is how OS X behaves, though. But I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is just that, somewhere in all of that music, is one corrupt song, and it happens to be in the first 80-ish MB, hence why it fails there.

A quick test would be to try to copy some other big corpus of data to the external drive, and see if that fails. If it does, I'd look closely at the external drive. If not, you probably just have some corrupt file somewhere.

If it turns out that OSX copies files persistently, ignoring errors, on a drag-and-drop operation, completely disregard my advice!
posted by fogster at 8:26 PM on January 20, 2008

try doing a little bit at a time. select the first 30 folders, label them, and drag them over. then the next 30 (or so). label (so you know where you are) then drag.

i've had this happen, and that's what i usually do to get around it.

usb is crap compared to firewire.

osx is much better than windows in dealing with errors or existing files. it even can tell you how long the copy will take, pretty accurately, rather than reporting on each individual file.
posted by KenManiac at 8:37 PM on January 20, 2008

Instead of drag-and-dropping the files via Finder, use a backup utility like iBackup to do it. Backup utilities copy one file at a time, skip over bad files, and keep logs. This way you can do the move without having to check on the progress and at the end you have a nice report of the bad files.

I'm still running on Tiger but I assume Time Machine could do this as well.
posted by junesix at 9:53 PM on January 20, 2008

I try to buy all my storage either for use as standalone NAS or ensure it has a firewire port since (and this is just personal bias) storage should be hooked up with firewire or gigE+, period.

I agree 100%, and yet I look at the external storage market and it's 90% USB, 7% Firewire, and a fraction eSata/GigE.
posted by gen at 3:10 AM on January 21, 2008

If you're not going to be using that drive on a Windows system, you should make sure it's "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" formatted using Disk Utility.
posted by D.C. at 7:48 AM on January 21, 2008