Copy issues

[llewbrowne]

i have 2 wd sata drives a 500 blue and a 640 black. the 500 which is ntfs went down so i bought the 640 to transfer the files before i try a reformat. Using fedora 12 live i started transferring over 235G over 9 hrs . the transfer hung at 3hrs 38 mins left. as i shut down the system to retry the transfer in smaller blocks i noticed the job read a little over 65 thousand files transferred being 65 thousand is one of those magic numbers i wonder if anyone else ran into a similar issue transferring a large amounts of files?

 

[linuxhero27]

From experience, the best way to copy data is in chunks. The best Live distro to use is Puppy due to low resources. Copy about 4 gigabytes at a time. It may be a bit of a pain, but it's better than having one file mess up all of your waiting.

 

[audiovoodoo]

rsync is your friend...

I've used it for ~280Gb backups running from Ubuntu live on old Athlon HW and it just works.

 

[linux_0]

Yeah, it's great as long as your drive is working When your drive's having hardware problems it's unlikely to work right.

It sounds like the 500 may be damaged or malfunctioning. Some data may still be readable but other regions on the disk may be messed up.

@OP if your drive's got problems, try to copy the data in small chucks as linuxhero27 suggested. And don't forget backups are your friend.

Good luck

 

[audiovoodoo]

The advantage of the rsync route is that it will do a CRC check whilst working, also fixed block size. If you remember a while back when I had a flakey drive that you helped me with it was rsync that got it off. You don't have to rsync the whole drive in one go and also if it does fail on a file it will not kill the job.

If you want to be seriously hardcore about it then dd or cpio could be argued as valid options.