"Compress" fails to complete

How much free space on your HD?

Can you compress a smaller number of items, say less than 10 or 5?

this sometimes happens with corrupt files. what kind of things are you zipping? try zipping fewer files or zipping them one at a time. it should tell you which file is causing the problem.

Mononoke Hime wrote:
I have 130 GB of free space.

I've successfully compressed 5, 10, 15 files, even all 50 of them, but the same thing happens if I try to compress the folder. But I know you can compress folders because I do it all the time on my iMac.

What is the overall size of the target folder again?

Strange - all I can think is there is some sort of competition for resources on the portable that causes a conflict/slowdown.

Are you running any kind of encoding software? Is Spotlight busy? Have you had any other indications of slowdowns of any type? Other users on the same computer? Target folder on the boot drive or external or network or CD/DVD...? Do you use FileVault? Is it just with one particular folder/collection of files?

Mononoke Hime wrote:
I'm compressing jpg files and none of them appear corrupted. I think the problem comes from trying to compress the folder, for some reason.

I don't know why compressing a folder would be an issue. can you compress other folders with images? or does it happen every time you try to compress any folder?

Message was edited by: V.K.

Mononoke Hime wrote:
I'm not running anything intensive here and there's no other sign of slowdown. The target folder is on my desktop. I've tried restarting the computer and relaunching the Finder, but nothing seems to help.

I've just tried compressing a different, small folder (3 MB) and it worked just fine...

this may sound silly but try this then. make a new folder, move the contents of the first folder to that one and try compressing that.

Are any of the files in the folder still open in any apps?

Restart, then duplicate/copy your target folder and then try to compress the copy.

look in the console log. any errors when you are trying to zip these folders? also, make a new user account, log into it and try zipping folders there. do you have the same problem there?