[pjwoods]

the equipment:
TiBook 667 (Gigabit) installed with OSX 10.3.6
firewire cable from my 1st gen iPod
WD 120GB HDD, enclosed in
"Jentec" brand enclosure

the story:
so i won this on ebay, tried to transfer about 30GB worth of files, and the transfer stalled repeatedly in the 9GB range. i figured it was the drive, under warranty, back to WD it goes. i get the replacement, zero the drive, format it, and transfers still stall (this time about 600MB into 9-10GB), though with what seems no rhyme or reason (1.88GB of 1.88GB transferred earlier with no problem).

the cause:
i was hoping that's where all y'all come in. i'm stumped; is this the cable getting bumped, a bad enclosure, or the drive? the only very small consistency i see is stalls seemed to occur in the 10-30% range of large transfers or a high number of files.

thanks,
patrick

[SSharon]

Do you have another cable you can try? Another computer that you can transfer files from? Is it always when you try transfering the same files or have you tried others (maybe one is corrupt?)? Have you tried repairing permissions and then trying the transfer? I can't remember if the tibook has two firewire ports . . . did you try both of them? Does the case have two ports . . . did you try both of those?

I'm not sure what the cause is in your case, but keep giving more info and hopefully we can nail it down.

[pjwoods]

hey, thanks so much for your reply. here's a bit more info:

-with a different cable and computer, the transfer stalled, too
-the files are legit; we were trying to transfer video/FC4 files
-my tibook just has the one firewire port
-for stalls on both computers, the symptoms were the same: other programs were active and functioning normally, but the progress bar in the finder stopped, and i couldn't do anything in the finder itself. the computer needed a ctrl+apple+power to restart.

any suggestions? it seems so weird that the enclosure chipset would stall the transfer so pecularly, but that's what it seems to me. thanks again. -p

[SSharon]

Hmm, I am only more confused now, but lets try some more tihngs. I guess you can try transfering less files at a time. Do it in chunks and see what happens. I have transfered 30+ gb before with no problem so there is certainly something wrong here. I still think you should try some of the other things I mentioned and make sure all of the files are ok and have proper permissions. That is one thing that has caused problems for me in the past. I have even had other strange problems where data goes bad but is not noticed. For example I burned a 700mb movie file to a cd and it plays fine on my mac from the disk but if I try to copy it to my hard drive I get an error at the same 500mb mark every time and with every optical drive I try. That gives me another idea . . . is it possible that there is a bad block on the destination drive as opposed to the original drive. If the disk is already blank try a utility to map the bad sectors or rezero the drive and see if the problem persists.

If I make no sense, its because its finals week and I haven't been sleeping. Just IM me for a translation my name is in my profile. Good Luck.

[Dr.Michael]

This does not sound like a hardware problem to me.
Maybe one of your files is corrupt and causes the problem.
Did you try to tar the files to larger chunks and transfer them? If this works its really a bad file.

tar -cvf archive.tar /<your folder that should be tarred>

man tar if you need more info. Or use Stuffit (slower)

[pjwoods]

so, here's where it gets interesting. i have:
-repaired permissions using disk utility (it found only a few weird things with entourage scripts)
-opened and used a set of 100 files
-these files do not transfer when i drag all 100
-zipping/tarring them up, however, lets the transfer occur (same file size, less actual files)
-UNzipping on the destination disk, however, stalls just like the transfers
-i was, however, able to view some vid files off the destination disk and they played smoothyl

-when transfers stall, the activity light stops blinking, remains static
-when unzips stall, the activity light goes off.

turning off the drive is the only way to interrupt the stall without a reboot, after which it always spins down. yes, i am thoroughly stumped. are you?

-p

[pjwoods]

the only consistent sypmtom i'm seeing, in fact, is that the drive stalls when it tries to process large NUMBERS of files. the size seems immaterial.

given my firewire port and cord have worked flawlessly with other drives/my ipod, that the HDD itself is a warrany replacement not a week old, and that i experienced these same symptoms on an imac, i'm inclined to thing something's wrong with the enclosure hardware still. but i could be wrong.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by pjwoods:
the only consistent sypmtom i'm seeing, in fact, is that the drive stalls when it tries to process large NUMBERS of files. the size seems immaterial.

given my firewire port and cord have worked flawlessly with other drives/my ipod, that the HDD itself is a warrany replacement not a week old, and that i experienced these same symptoms on an imac, i'm inclined to thing something's wrong with the enclosure hardware still. but i could be wrong.

But, transfer of the tarred file works. Untar means, they are all already on the drive. If this stalls too it is unlikely that the firewire system (controller, cable, oxford bridge) is affected.

What kind of file system do you use on the drive? Fat32 for example has a file size limit of 2GB. HFS has a limit of I think 32,767 files in a folder (because the number is stored in an integer) Maybe its worth to find out, if your file system has a limit for the number of files in the same directory. So next: is you directory structure flat or do you use a lot of subdirectories?

[Macola]

Do you know what chipset the enclosure uses? I had similar problems with a generic (FMI/CompUSA) enclosure that used the Prolific chipset. Transferred the drive to an Oxford-based enclosure and it worked fine.

[pjwoods]

well, the plot continues to thicken. Dr. Michael, i just powered on the drive and the untar of the exact same file that stalled last night just worked. i transferred an RAR, and it expanded fine, too. these are about 2-300 image files (none greater than 2GB), about 100, in a flat directory structure. seems like HDD format type is immaterial here.

but why would untar fail last night and work tonight on the exact same file? je ne sais pas.

macola: the only logo i see stamped on the enclosure's chipset is NEC.

i think i may just buy another enclosure and see what happens. thanks for everyone's continued support. thoughts?