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o2byz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 30, 2010
20
0
Here's my situation:

I've got my crashed laptop drive in an enclosure connected via USB to my Imac. I'm trying to copy over the files to my iMac drive. I keep getting this error -36. I've narrowed that down to either filesystem or IO error. It was suggested to use Terminal.app to move the files because there is a flaw in Finder.

I'm a total noob when it comes to Terminal and Unix. I'd appreciate any help with the context.

I want to move my itunes and photos which are on the desktop of the drive.
Is there a way to copy the entire folder to a drive and what are the lines of code for that in Terminal?
 
It depends on the path of your drive. I'll give you an example but you have to put in the correct path AKA location.

Code:
cp -r /Volumes/username/desktop ~/Documents

this will copy your desktop folder from your enclosed drive to your home documents folder.
 
I tried that and I got back this:


usage: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-apvX] source_file target_file
cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-apvX] source_file ... target_directory

Like I said, I'm a big time noob with this stuff. Right now Terminal is sitting in the root of my mac (I think).

The path I'm trying to copy is from the external drive /OS/Users/ColtAV45/Desktop

I'd like to just copy that straight over.
 
BigDave,

The code works but I still get the Error -36 pop up when it tries to copy certain files over. What can I do? Do you know how to solve that?
 
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