Copy large amount of files.. errors.

[eric2006]

I am trying to get a large amount of files (about 80 GB) off of a firewire drive, and onto a USB drive, so that I can use the firewire drive for video stuff. The problem is, it takes quite a long time to copy, and it will usualy find an excuse to quit halfway through. For example, it will tell me that I don't have permissions to copy a file (even as root), or that some item allready exists, etc. Then, it just quits because of that one file. Is there a way to copy all the files without running into this kind of error? I have tried creating an image, and I tried creating an archive, with simmilar errors.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Mikuro]

Hmm. I had the exact same problem once. Drove me mad. If I remember correctly, I ended up launching Disk Utility as root and then making an image from there. You can launch Disk Utility as root by opening Terminal and entering:
sudo "/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility"

Carbon Copy Cloner might also get the job done.

Is this Firewire drive by any chance a bootable volume? You might need to repair its permissions then. Or maybe you can get info on the disk and check the "ignore ownership on this volume" box (I don't think that helped me before, but my memory is a little fuzzy, so I figure I should mention it).

 

[eric2006]

I tried that.. It said the file was "too large". I'll try it with my dad's 2 Ghz iMac.. hopefully it won't be too large for it.

 

[eric2006]

Turns out my dad already has the problem file on another hard drive, so thats done. For reformat, the Drive is currently formated as ms-dos filesystem. Is this OK to reformat it as, or should I do something else? I'd be nice to read the drive with windows computers, but if I gain a lot of performance with another mac-only format, I'll use it. I will use this drive for video editing.