Error -36

C

crashprojects

Registered
I"m trying to copy about 12000 songs from my internal HD to an external so I can wipe my drive clean and start again. The problem is that I keep getting this "disk cannot be read from or written to" every few hundred songs. The songs have come from all over, and there is no common thread to how I acquired any of them. I've actually gotten this error when trying to copy several different file types to an external HD and I've no earthly idea why. I'm sure the drive is riddled with irreparable errors which is why I want to wipe it, but I need to get a lot of these files over before I do so.

Can anyone recommend some kind of utility that will identify and/or repair these corrupt files so I don't have to stop and start the transfer every 30 seconds?

Thanks.
 
I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that your external drive is formatted as FAT32 -- maybe you purchased the drive, plugged it in, and just ran with it without reformatting it first, or perhaps you need to retain compatibility with Windows computers and left it formatted as FAT32.

This is a common error with copying multiple files to a FAT32 drive with Mac OS X. I would highly recommend backing up the data on the external and reformatting it as "Mac OS (Extended)". That will maximize compatibility with your Mac as well as possibly alleviate the error message you're seeing.

If this is not the case, then whoa... my extrasensory powers must be failing me. Please explain if this is not the case.
 
It's Mac formatted and has been for the duration of it's life.

I'm tearing my hair out over this!

Perhaps you can recommend something other than wiping the drive? I ran disk warrior on it and it says there are irreparable errors so I'm thinking that's really all I can do.

Thanks-
 
If DiskWarrior can't resurrect it in place, then I don't know what other course of action you can take.

It seems like a complete backup of the data and a reformat (perhaps a repartition to write a new partition map on the drive) are the best things to do at this point.

Dang, I was way off with that FAT32 thing, huh? :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top