Best way to copy big volumes?

[Maukka]

My question this time is not strcitly about MSP, but since the issue is related and others here may have similar problems, I thought I'd post it on this forum. I hope this is ok.

What is the best way to transfer my video files from one external hard drive to another?

I currently have my MSP project material on a 150 G Lacie drive (FAT 32). That drive is nearly full, so I need to transfer everything to a bigger drive.

I tried this: I had a Norton Ghost 9 backup of that drive (backup on an external 250 G Lacie), so I tried simply to restore the data to a third Drive (also Lacie 250 G), but Ghost was unable to restore the data...! Gives an error message, and Symantec support was clueless.

Ghost also has a "Copy Drive" function, but how well does it cope with copying to a disk which is not the same size as the source? Is there any advantage using Ghost "Copy Drive" rather than just use Windows XP "Copy Files" command (which probably takes about 24 hours to copy the 150G...)?

How do others here copy big volumes of video files from one disk to another?

Thanks,
Maukka

[Devil]

I recently copied 110 Gb from my RAID array to a separate 200 Gb disk, just by dragging and dropping. Worked like a charm, even if it took what seemed like days (actually, only a coupla hours!)

[Greg]

I currently have my MSP project material on a 150 G Lacie drive (FAT 32). That drive is nearly full, so I need to transfer everything to a bigger drive.

Maukka

Why FAT 32 ? I rather suspect this may be part of your problem, how is the new drive formatted?

Regards,
Greg

[Maukka]

Why would FAT 32 be a problem?
Please tell me, if there is something I am missing. I don't know that much about formating disks under XP (I have never done it)
The Lacey drives came preformatted FAT 32; I did not format them. They are all FAT 32 formatted.

Another strange thing that happened was that after the failed attempt to restore to another disk, the destination disk became "invisible" to XP's My Computer. However, if I go to Computer Management -> Disk Management, the drive is still visible there.

The only thing Symantec support could say about this was that reformating the disk should return it back to normal. The disk is empty, so formating is not a problem for me as such. But curiously, the Disk Management "Format" command seems to have only NTFS fromating available for this disk...

Yet XP Help it says (about Quick Format): "Only the NTFS file system is available for dynamic volumes in Disk Management. However, you can format dynamic volumes with either the FAT or FAT32 file systems using the format command."

But FAT 32 is not on the available format list...

I am afraid that if I now format the disk as NTFS, I will then have a mixture of NTFS and FAT 32 formatted disks, which may cause problems for instance when I later want to make backups using disk imaging (Ghost or something else which actually works). I would prefer to have all of them fromatted the same way (i.e. FAT 32 in this case).

In 2005.... there has to be a better way to copy 150G to another disk than just dragging and dropping! No?

Thanks,

Maukka

[Greg]

FAT 32 on its own is not the problem, sorry I was a little unclear. What I thought may have been the problem was if the new drive was NTFS, there may have been an incompatibility between the two, causing your problem.

FAT 32 however has inherent file size limitations, which are not present in NTFS, going forward NTFS is always recomended.

Doesn't really help you now though, originally you stated 'gives an error message'. Let us know the error, maybe it will help.

With regard to the 'invisible' problem, could be a drive letter designation problem. Once restored, the drive in question may have a different designation to what it originally had, which may explain it 'disappearing'

Remember also 150 G is a lot of data, patience may well be the only answer!!

Regards,
Greg

[tyamada]

First of all FAT 32 formatted drives only allow a file to be 4GB, NTFS file system allows files larger than 4GB. I'm surprised that you haven't gotten an error message or a drive crash.

If you purchased Ghost 9 it came with Ghost 2003. If you want to image a drive use Ghost 2003, it supports USB drives and both types of partitions, NTFS and FAT32.

You can use almost any size drive as long as the information being copied will fit on the drive being copied to.
It's very fast depending on your computer and hard drive combination, I have copied 120GB in about 30 minutes. This is much faster than a DOS/Windows copy command.

[THoff]

Don't use Ghost, or you'll wind up with another FAT32 volume (though a FAT32 volume can be converted to NTFS without losing the contents) because it clones your drive.

Just open the root of the source drive using Windows Explorer, press Ctrl-A to select all objects, and then drag them to the new drive. It might take awhile, but it will work, and doesn't cost anything.

[Maukka]

Greg, you were right. It was a drive letter problem. The drive no longer had any letter at all designated to it. Once I designated a letter to it, it apeared on My Computer.

AND THAT's NOT ALL!!!

It turned out to contain a full copy of my data!!!

The good news is that Ghost Restore had indeed worked! I just could not see it, and Ghost also gave very bad sounding error messages.

And then the bad news... during the restore operation had Ghost turned the 250G drive into a 150G drivve...

I guess there is a certain logic to it: Ghost used the image of the source drive to create an exact copy of it, including the drive's size. I should have thought of this.

So I am kind of back to starting point... given that the whole point was to migrate my data to a bigger disk.

Anyway, it is very comforting to see that the Ghost backups I have of my data disks as well as the system drive seem to restore after all.

I suppose I wil now just use XP's god old drag, drop and wait function.

Thanks for help!

Maukka

[sjj1805]

To convert FAT32 to NTFS the instructions are here:-
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodte ... rtfat.mspx

To make a copy of a hard drive partition I use Partition Magic which I have found simple and reliable.
It can be found here:-
http://www.symantec.com/partitionmagic/

Partition magic will also resize your hard drive so you can get back the "missing 100GB"

[Terry Stetler]

Amen. I use PM8 for my partitioning & disc management needs.