[MacDV] Quicktime .mov files - cannot transfer to firewire?

[Michael Winter]

On Feb 15, 2005, at 8:02 PM, Nick Scalise wrote:

> I remember something like this being discussed over at X4U a couple 
> years ago. Unfortunately, there are no archives going back that far at 
> themacintoshguy.com.

A lot of us had problems with large copies to/from Firewire drives in 
the "early days" of Firewire. Most of those problems were solved with 
firmware upgrades to the drives.

Kathy, have you tried duplicating any of the files? If I get files that 
won't copy and I can't duplicate, I generally conclude the file is 
corrupted (fits with the error message you're getting -it can't read 
the file). If one of the files is on an internal drive, disconnect 
everything from the Firewire ports and try duplicating the file on the 
same drive. That will eliminate any "Firewire issues".

I would next boot the computer from your OS X install disk, and run 
Disk Utility, focusing on one drive at a time -starting first from your 
startup drive (or whichever drive you're trying to copy from). In the 
"First Aid" pane, Repair the disk, then Repair Disk Permissions. If 
none of the files you want to copy are on the startup drive, you'll 
want to do one of the Firewire drives too.

Then restart the computer with all Firewire drives disconnected and try 
duplicating the file on the same "repaired" disk. If possible (again 
assuming one of the files is on your boot drive), I might even go so 
far as to create a new user and move the file and change permissions so 
you could try duplicating it from the new "clean" account.

If this now works with your startup drive (being optimistic) then you 
can plug in one Firewire drive, start up Disk Utility from your 
/Applications/Utilities folder, and do the Repair and Repair 
Permissions on that drive and test it out.

As a last resort you could try something like DiskWarrior, but the 
error message and behavior indicate to me the files are corrupted.

Good Luck!

-Mike