ARGH! Please help with my file copy conundrum...

[glitch44]

Short version: copying NTFS drive to identical HFS+ drive results in 8GB of unaccounted space... ?

Long version:

Plugged in 80 gig media drive from my Windows XP computer, so it's NTFS.
Plugged in an 80 gig media drive that I formatted as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled). (note: same model, size of hard drive)

Opened the NTFS drive (named Storage)
Select all the folders, copy 14 items

Opened the OS X drive (named OS X storage)
Pasted all the folders.
Waited about 1.5 hours as it copied 60GB or so.

Should be a clone, right? Nope.
The NTFS drive has 6.93GB free, the OS X drive has 14.24GB Free.
as shown here:



But here's the odd thing: all the folders I copied are exactly the same size.
as shown here:



where did the other 8GB on the NTFS drive go?
it can't be 8GB of drive overhead can it?

I want to make sure I have an exact copy, so this is driving me nuts.

please help!

 

[Angrist]

While I sort of expect NTFS to have more overhead than HFS+ .... this does seem to be more than that.

There are probably hidden files on the NTFS drive that you can't see and didn't copy.

Open the terminal, navigate to the NTFS drive, and type "ls -a" (without the quotes). That should list all files on the base leve

 

[glitch44]

okay, so the NTFS drive plugged into an XP machine has 80,917 files
the HFS+ drive plugged into an OS X machine has 64,798 files.

why is my Imac not copying 15,000 or so files?
why can't it see them?

how can i do an exact NTFS --> HFS+ copy?

 

[glitch44]

an update for anyone with a similar problem that googles a solution...



It was odd: the NTFS drive plugged into my OS X machine only seemed to see 65k or so files, 15k less than the same NTFS drive plugged into an XP machine.

my solution was to keep in on the XP machine and share the whole drive over the network, then copy them that way. I guess this puts the XP machine in charge of what's seen.

I really wish I knew why OS X couldn't see them-- odd filenames? directory structure too deep? Was it just thumbs.db files?-- so that it wouldn't happen again or I could advise others about it... but I guess it's fixed for now.