I recently had a partitioned IBM Deskstar 120GB drive on a DP450 G4 lose the partition with the operating system on it. I reinstalled OS X on another drive that was in the system and then could see all of the partitions except the one with the original operating system. Concluding the drive was bad, I decided it was time to install backup protection. I added a Tempo ATA 133 card and a WD 120 GB drive with 2 MB buffer. I then proceeded to try to copy all of my QT video files from the problem Drive to the new backup drive. All went well until I tried to copy files that were greater than 2 GB. Copying starts and then as it gets to 2 GB I get an error message that says Error -50. When I installed the new drive, all I did was initialize it. I can copy the files from the problem drive over firewire to an external drive with no problem but cannot copy them to this internal drive. I am suspecting there is something about the drive or its file structure but do not know. I did update the Tempo ATA 133 card to the latest firmware at the recommendation of their service tech but still no difference. Any ideas on what the problem is would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Doyle
There maybe a file limitation. I know in various favor of Unix, Irix and AIX, there is a limit of 2GB. These versions you have to enable large file systems.
Apple may have that 2GB limit, they may have a switch to enable large file systems in the creation of the file system. Also it maybe be in Mac OS Server.
This is a guess on my part, due to past experiences.
ive transferred files larger than 2GB to an internal drive from firewire and network drives with no problems. you might want to try to run disk utility on your internal drive.
when looking through apple knowledge base, i couldnt find any error message "error -50" that related to your problem
Thanks for the inputs. I guess one of my questions is whether I needed to something other than iniitalize the drive. It came out of the box. I put it in the machine and it asked me if I wanted to initialize it. Not sure if it maybe is originally setup for a PC system and therefore needs some sort of full formatting.
Well, I figured it out and as you might expect, it was cockpit error. When I initialized the new 120 GB drive, I hit a quick return instead of reading the options and initialized the drive as HFS instead of HFS+ which is the extended format. So, I reinitialized the drive and now it easily copies 6 GB files.
Thanks for the forum, sometimes you just need a place to help you think through the problem.
