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Hard Drive Files Change in size when copied from SCSI to FireWire! HELP!

LimeiBook86

LimeiBook86

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 4, 2002
8,003
54
Go Vegan
OK I have a G3 Mini Tower, I have added an old SCSI 6GB HD so that I can copy the files off of it to my FireWire Hard Drive and then erase it. But something funny happens... Well the drive is a SCSI 6.03 GB Drive and it says 3.29 GB are taken up but When I go to copy all the files to my FireWire Drive it copies only 1.7 GB of files. Now is it converting it to a different format or something? Do SCSI drives take up more space? What is happening!? Now Hard Drive file I have copied are only about 1.7GB when the original drive (SCSI) said they were 3.29GB What is going on here? I have taken a picture of the windows on my screen, they are labeled, one is the original drive and the other is the copied drive. The files when copied seem to take up half the space of its original. I know this is worded wierd. I want to make sure I have all my data before I erase this SCSI HD, can someone please help, here is an image:
SCSI.jpg
HELP PLEASE
 
my best guess is that your old hard drive is formatted in HFS, and the new firewire drive is formatted in HFS+.

the difference between the two is that the newer HFS+ drive has smaller allocation block sizes, so if there are a ton of small files, they will take up less space since they can better fit the block sizes more efficiently.

make sense? kinda confusing.
 
not necessarily. 99% sure yes. as long as you did a regular drag and drop copy, and it finished with no errors, i would go ahead and erase the old one.

do you have a cd burner? if so. do a back up just in case. a cd only costs 30¢ now anyway. small price to pay for a piece of mind.
 
i'm not so sure coping by hand will copy things like invisible files and folders... and trust me, you'll want those too. Generally whenever i have to move a drive's worth of data, i use Carbon Copy Cloner (search download.com or versiontracker.com) which works fairly well. It simply performs the command-line copy hundreds of times over to ensure every file gets copied (with correct permissions i think)...

if i were you i'd try that before potentially wiping data...

:)
pnw
 
Too late...; well it was from an old Performa anyway, I don't think I knew what invisible folders were then... oh well :)
 
If you drag the drive icon onto the other drive and not just the contents then it will copy the invisible files. Likely though, since it was a performa, its HFS vs HFS+.
 
if you drag a folder, the foler gets copied. invisible files and all.

if you drag file by file and dont have view all hidden files enable in finder, than you will miss them.

remember that in MacOS X a harddisk is just another folder, treat it as such.

ps. HFS -> HFS+ for me resulted in 100MB being gained on a 350MB hdd.
 
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