Nightmare trying to reformat external HD

Support Nucleus Support
1

So current external HD is formatted to journal OS. Tried to reformat it to exFat. My music is also stored on a Backup HD that is back up using Time machine. So I erased my HD and reformatted it to exFat. Dragged media file from “back up” to newly formatted HD. After about 10gb or so I started getting a message “cant copy file due to same name file”, or something to that effect. ie I had to Bob Dylan files in the same folder. One named Bob Dylan and the the bob dylan. Then the transfer stopped. So I went to the back up and it would not allow me to make any changed. Even though I am authorized to read/write on drive. My only solution was to individually move each artist one by one. This time when I got same message it gave me the option to “skip” file.
So not I think I have 95% of my file back on the External HD. But of course I forgot to reformat it to exFat. Any suggestion?

Edit. This is the exact message I get “You can’t copy “Empire burlesque” because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn’t distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames.”

3

Hi @Larry_Gelman,

Just to verify — The external drive you’re moving content to that is attached to the Nucleus is not formatted in exFAT? Did the reformatting you mentioned above not work? Or are you talking about a different drive?

For the initial transfer, are you able to attach both external drives to your Mac via USB? Is there any change when doing so?

Are all of the files that didn’t transfer due to duplicate names? Are you able to adjust the names on the Mac directly and then re-transfer?

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Yes duplicate names, not songs. The music is stored on a external HD. That won’t allow me to alter the files

Yes the drive has not been formatted to exFAT yet. I was attempting to before the stoppage.

Yes I had both drive connected at the same time to my iMac.

My Issue is I cant make any changes to my back up HD(that contains my music).

5

Hi @Larry_Gelman,

Since you can’t make adjustments directly on the drive due to the formatting, you can move the files to another location where you do have editing permissions, make the change, and then move them back onto the drive. Once the edits are made so there are not duplicate names you should be able to continue forward without any issues.

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Thats just it. When I move them from my external HD to my iMac I get the same error message. Then the transfer stops. I’m going to try to re import them into iTunes and see if I’ll be able to make changes from there.

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Thanks for the update, @Larry_Gelman — Definitely let us know how it goes when trying iTunes.

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@Larry_Gelman Be careful copying stuff back and forth without paying proper attention to what you’re doing, that’s a sure way to lose stuff!!

The problem is the Mac (HFS+) is a lot more lenient with file names, hence “bob dylan” and “Bob Dylan” are different - with other disk formats, they’re not. I would fix this!

Copying in and out of iTunes is not going to solve the problem, it’s just going to disguise it.

Take time to go through your folder structure, and clean it up. Then it will undoubtedly copy without issue.

1 Like
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@mikeb. Thanks Mike. Yes I agree. My issue is that the Backup drive won’t allow me to make any changes.