Can't copy files from external HDD back to my MacBook after Lion upgrade

Before I upgraded, I copied a bunch of folders to my external 1TB drive. Pictures, Documents, Movies, Music —*for example. Now that I'm on Lion, I've plugged my drive in again, I go to my Backup/Pictures folder, open that, select all its contents, then drag them to my ~/Pictures directory on the MacBook. What happens here is strange... I get the usual transfer dialog saying I've got about a 13 minute wait. It moves along until about 20%, then just disappears like everything's done.

If I try to copy my Backup/Movies/Home Alone.avi (for example) over to ~/Movies/, the file copies entirely, but then sits there, greyed out, and won't open on the MacBook. It's all dim, like it's some kind of system file or something. I've chmodded it to 777 and still no good.

I've done a "Repair Disk" to both the MacBook and the external, but that didn't help. I've done "Repair Permissions" on the MacBook too. Still nothing. I have no idea how my permissions got this wacked, but I would appreciate any help anyone can offer for repairing them!

One final thing: If I do all the copying via Terminal, things go just fine... "cp /Volumes/MyBook/Movies/HomeAlone.avi ~/Movies/" works. It finishes, I can play it, la-dee-da! But: this is my girlfriend's stuff, and she is not willing to use her external drive exclusively through Terminal

Thanks again for any help with this! Ugh.

This problem is not just confined to upgraded machines. I have a new Macbook Air, and have the same issue. The only difference is that the copying process actually completes and then the file disappears. The best advice I've found thus far is the same as given above: use terminal and cp to manually copy the file, in which case it works perfectly. BUT that's not viable in the long term, and should not be required in the short term. I'd also verified and repaired permissions, to no avail.

Specific details:
new Macbook Air running Lion
external WD 1TB HDD formatted as HFS+
copy files by drag-n-drop, and the file disappears
copy files using command line, and it works perfectly

I can't imagine we're the only two users with this problem, as it appears to be due to some issue with Lion itself.

I've just spent some more time with it and think I may have cracked it...

One of the files I'd backed up (or two, rather) were ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain and /Library/Keychains/System.keychain. The login keychain was actually fine, but a close look at the System.keychain showed that it was not owned by root or in the same "wheel" group as the other files in that folder. I enabled the root user, then did a `chown root:wheel System.keychain` and then restarted.

Now things seem to work as normal... Can you confirm, Damien?

hmm...I don't seem to have a 'login.keychain' file on the new system. I went into Keychain Access, and it shows all the login items as expected, which are all being synced via MobileMe. I wonder if it's a MobileMe issue? I did have considerable trouble getting it to sync my mail account, so perhaps that has something to do with it? The system.keychain file seemed to be fine on my system.


EDIT: I plugged the external HDD into my MBP (which I'm swapping over from, which I upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard about 2 weeks ago) and was able to copy the files to the external HDD without any troubles at all. On reconnecting the eHDD to the MBA, the files were still visible. So whatever the problem is, it is not directly connected to whether your system was upgraded to Lion, or running a clean install.

FWIW, we're not alone...

Insane Lion bug? Data copying (or not) - Ars Technica OpenForum


EDIT:

And some more: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3204529?start=0&tstart=0

Note that the only "effective" solution in the second link is relaunching Finder, but I tried it myself several times to no effect at all. So, at best we have some dodgy non-universal workarounds that don't fix the problem for everyone, and may not do anything at all.