Windows 7 Copying Problems

gman

gman

Messages
9,905
Name
Graham
Edit My Images
Yes
I'm a little stumped with this one and struggling to find a solution. In addition to my primary SSD drive I've got a couple of regular hard drives in my computer for backup and storing different things such as one for photos, one for business, one for personal stuff etc. I also backup to external drives which I connect using USB3.

Looking at the internal hard drive I use for my photos storage, it's a 3TB drive and has a lot of photos stored. I recently transferred a lot of more recent photos across from my primary SSD drive into this hard drive, but when I went to then back these up onto my external drive it seems to hang on the first photo about half way through copying and no other photo from the recent batch will copy - it just hangs there for ages.

However, I can copy any of the other photos I've got stored no problem, it's just this recent batch. I can open them fine, although there is a slight delay compared with the older photos and I can also move them about within the same drive, but as soon as I try to move them outwith the drive or duplicate them (as I was trying to make a duplicate set within the same drive and then back those ones up) it does the same thing and hangs.

I've ran SMART and it says the drive is 100% healthy but despite this could this be a sign of a failing hard drive? If so, how on earth am I going to back these photos up when it just hangs? I've tried other copy programs instead of using Windows shell copy and also tried using backup software but no luck.

Any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated?
 
No idea why it's happening.

Can you open an image and then save it to another drive? That might at least be a solution, if not too many of them.

Alternatively, can you try to copy a few at a time? It might eliminate the possibility that a corrupted file is causing a problem.
 
How exactly are you trying to back them up? Are you just copying them to another drive or are you using some other back up method, eg a back-up program? What program are you using to do the "batch" copy that you mention?

Have you checked thr properties of the drive to which you are trying to back them up to? Have you checked the properties of the drive from which you are trying to copy them? - eg no read only or write protected?

With regard to whether the hdd you are using as back up is working, have you tried connecting it to another computer? Can it be read? can images be moved or copied to/from it?

These ideas might help you ascertain whether it is the copy part of the action that is at fault or whether it is the hdd.
 
Thanks but tried all sorts of variations, it's not the backup drive because it happens no matter what destination drive I try, even when trying to copy within the same hard drive!

Chkdsk came back fine as well. It's very strange.
 
Anything showing in the event logs? Use eventvwr to look for errors.
 
gman said:
Thanks but tried all sorts of variations, it's not the backup drive because it happens no matter what destination drive I try, even when trying to copy within the same hard drive!

Chkdsk came back fine as well. It's very strange.
Click to expand...
Did you chkdsk both the source and destination?

Edit - should read properly..
 
How tech savvy are you? It may be worth creating a Linux boot disk, booting into Linux and see if you can move or copy via that instead of windows?
 
Cheers for help so far. Stuff I already tried before was also safe mode, no luck. Tried one at a time etc. Checked error log and my Sound Forge was throwing up problems so I uninstalled it but still no luck.

Never thought about permissions, I'll give that a try today thanks. Never tried xcopy either although did read some people online suggesting that. I'll look at that also.

It's probably time I get new hard drives also, these ones are about five years old I think.
 
Permissions seem fine, nothing looks like it could cause a problem. I've managed to copy some of the other files but the transfer speed is about 6MB/s which is crazy slow for transferring between internal hard drives. Did another test on an older previous file and it cropied immediately so I'm still stumped as to why these new files are being so difficult?

I've also noticed the response time in resource monitor for Disk3 (Z) which is where I'm copying from is over 18,000!!!

Here's a screenshot from resource monitor of the hard drives. I'm copying from Disk3 (Z) to my primary SSD drive Disk1 (C).

2017-10-21 11_49_08-Resource Monitor.jpg




I've just spotted this with my partitions starting offset. Could this be the problem as disk 3 is not 1048576?

2017-10-21 12_08_15-Administrator_ C__Windows_system32_cmd.exe.jpg
 
Last edited:
Gave up. Nothing seemed to work so putting it down to some sort of corruption. Replacing the hard drives anyway just in case.
 
Since deleting those new files everything is back to normal, very strange. But I'm swapping all of them out just in case.
 
That's the older files now having problems, looks like it is in fact the hard drive. When I pulled it out and checked the sticker this one isn't as old as I thought it was. A little disappointing.
 
Do you have a lot of long folder names and files. This can cause copy issues if you exceed the maximum length
 
Not many I don't think. I also tried renaming to single character but no luck. It's a 3GB Western Digital Blue drive with 64MB cache. I never checked if I've got it as MBR or GUID though if that could be an issue seeing as it's over 2GB.
 
gman said:
Not many I don't think. I also tried renaming to single character but no luck. It's a 3GB Western Digital Blue drive with 64MB cache. I never checked if I've got it as MBR or GUID though if that could be an issue seeing as it's over 2GB.
Click to expand...

As far as I know MBR and GUID only matter on the primary drive, the one your operating system is stored on.

Other disks are simply formatted with NTFS - unless you actually want FAT or Ex FAT.

These days I find it can make a disk much faster to format it at 64K or 128K instead of the default 4k partitions - this especially counts when you have large files - small files can really slow down disk transfer.
 
petersmart said:
As far as I know MBR and GUID only matter on the primary drive, the one your operating system is stored on.

Other disks are simply formatted with NTFS - unless you actually want FAT or Ex FAT.

These days I find it can make a disk much faster to format it at 64K or 128K instead of the default 4k partitions - this especially counts when you have large files - small files can really slow down disk transfer.
Click to expand...


Cheers, I'll look into that as I've not transferred anything into the new drive yet so can reformat it again easily enough.
 
gman said:
Cheers, I'll look into that as I've not transferred anything into the new drive yet so can reformat it again easily enough.
Click to expand...

I forgot to mention for the fastest transfer both drives should be 64K etc, although one being 64K will help in speed.

Also I often turn files (photos, music etc) into image files (.iso) using ImgBurn and VirtualCloneDrive for reading them.

http://www.imgburn.com

https://www.elby.ch/en/products/vcd.html

That creates a virtual CD/DVD drive on my PC which is excellent for many things - for instance I have turned a lot of my music into an iso file (about 1GB) which I can then put through the virtual CD drive and play them in Windows media player continuously for as long as I want (with shuffle turned on)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top