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Copying from Windows Share Problem

S

skp574

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 16, 2005
280
0
greenwich.london.uk
I have been trying to copy 8+ gigs of MP3s from my old windows PC for the last couple of weeks with big problems.

At first I thought it was a wireless access point problem. Anyway, let me give you the scenario.

I have an iMac with APE connected to a 3Com Wireless router. I have my old PC connected via wifi to that (3com router).

I have shared a folder on the PC which contains my MP3s.

I can access the share from my iMac no problem. I simply drag the folder over to a local folder on the Mac. After a while of copying it stalls.

I left it this evening and it got to 840 MB and did not get any further.

Originally I thought it was a wireless incompatibility between Mac and PC, hence the APE purchase, but this has not solved the problem.

Has anything tried to copy large amounts of files from a PC and it stalled before???

I know I can get around this by burning a couple of DVDs, but that is not the point, it should work.

What is at fault here, the PC or the Mac? Is there a work around?

This is the final part of my Mac migration, as soon as I get these MP3s over, I can ditch the PC.
 
I had problems copying files if there was a character in the filename that worked on Windows but not OS X. Of course now that I think about it, it may have been the other way around. Either way, I think I got an error message instead of it stalling. If you can connect the 2 computers via ethernet cable it will definately go much faster. That is how I do it anytime there is that amount of data. Even between 2 of my Macs.
 
turn on FTP and upload from the PC via wired.

or get a NFS server for your windows pc try that. SMB/CIFS sucks ass.
 
I delved a bit deeper in the mystery slow down and found that of all the MP3s I imported into iTunes, it, for some reason skipped those with accented characters in? So I have a library that I have to go through and look for missing tracks. No errors were displayed during importing. It was only when I played a mix CD the the next track didn't mix in right.

My CDs are in storage so I have to go to Amazon and check the full track listing to make sure all the tracks are there! What a PITA!

I also noticed when copying from a Windows share that the wireless signal strength and speed nose dived during the transfer. It went down to 2Mb/s? When idle it is up to 48Mb/s.

I think I'm gonna burn a pile of DVDs.
 
skp574 said:
I delved a bit deeper in the mystery slow down and found that of all the MP3s I imported into iTunes, it, for some reason skipped those with accented characters in? So I have a library that I have to go through and look for missing tracks. No errors were displayed during importing. It was only when I played a mix CD the the next track didn't mix in right.

My CDs are in storage so I have to go to Amazon and check the full track listing to make sure all the tracks are there! What a PITA!

I also noticed when copying from a Windows share that the wireless signal strength and speed nose dived during the transfer. It went down to 2Mb/s? When idle it is up to 48Mb/s.

I think I'm gonna burn a pile of DVDs.
Click to expand...

first off you didn't take anyone advice to use a wired connection which would probably solve your transfer problems. further more, someone suggested using the ftp server on os x which basically switchs from smb file transfer to ftp which is a stable protocol between mac and pc.

as to your file names missing special characters, perhaps using ftp would solve that problem.
 
FTP File Transfer

I have set up an FTP server on my PC. It is much faster transferring files. The wireless connection is not stalling either.

There must be something wrong with SMB transfer?

However, it is still having trouble copying filenames with accented characters. Finder thinks they are Unit executable files. It then stalls when copying that file.
 
Well I cleared out my iTunes library and started again!

After mucking around with file transfers from my PC, I gave up with SMB and FTP transfer. For some unknown reason Finder does not like filenames with accented characters. It sees them as a Unix executable. The copy window then crashes and Finder locks. The only way to get out of the copy is to relaunch Finder. Even if you disconnect from the FTP server it still tries to copy the file without an error. Why does the Finder crash every open window? It's a shame it can't be multi-threaded. Nevermind.

In the end I gots out my backup DVDs of my music, and fed them into my Mac. I did a Find file and removed all the .m3u files so iTunes won't import everything twice. That was the easy bit, I then dragged each root folder over to iTunes. Perfect it works.

The only thing I have to do now is create a playlist for each disc. That's the time consuming bit. But I am taking the time and adding the CD covers as well.

PC to Mac connectivity is not as plain-sailing as I was lead to believe.

Anyone know of a script that can search through filenames for accented characters and change them for non-accented one?
 
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