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User profile for user: silentbry
silentbry Author
User level: Level 1
9 points

error code -36 / problem w/ Lacie Porsche drive

I'm not sure if this is correct place to post, I apologize if not.
I have a Lacie Porsche external hard drive which I'm having problems getting files off of. The Lacie drive is having problems ejecting and locking up, so I figured it would be good idea to take everything off the drive, put it on my computer, then reformat the external and put the files back, hoping that will fix problem possibly.
- but, when I'm trying to transfer some files to my computer from lacie drive, I get following error on many files: the "Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in “iso-8859-1-a.raw” could not be read or written. (Error Code -36)" . Of course the name/type of file varies. Anyone know what this error means?
- I've heard this specific Lacie "porsche" drive is known for being 'querky' unfortunately, and their customer support has been bad. Anyone have any suggestions on getting the querks out w/ the drive as well?
-thank you in advance to anyone w/ advice.

Imac, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Imac

Posted on Feb 3, 2010 7:17 AM

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4 replies
User profile for user: V.K.
V.K.
User level: Level 9
56,174 points

Feb 5, 2010 10:52 AM in response to silentbry

the error you are getting is an I/O error indicating a hardware problem accessing the drive. it might not be possible to get around and it might not be fixable even by reformatting the drive. you can try copying files using terminal. sometimes that works even if finder doesn't want to copy them. the command is very simple 

cp -R /path/to/source/folder path/to/target/folder/


this will copy the source folder to the target folder. to get the right paths drag the folders in question to the terminal window. make sure all the spaces in the command are present. if that doesn't work try repairing the external using disk utility. repair disk, not permissions. if that doesn't help you can try using Dis Warrior or a similar tool on it. if nothing works you are SOL.
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User profile for user: Charles Minow
Charles Minow
User level: Level 6
9,184 points

Feb 5, 2010 6:09 PM in response to silentbry

silentbry wrote:
anyone have suggestions?


Try a different FireWire cable? It's always possible that the cable might be bad. And make sure it's seated firmly. That can cause errors, though it doesn't sound like that's going to fix your problem.

Also, you might want to look in the Console app at the system log and make sure it's the external drive with the problem. You're looking for a log entry that mentions a disk I/O error, and it'll have a somewhat cryptic identifier after it: disk0s2 or disk3s2. Look in the Disk Utility at the drive information for each drive and it'll tell you which one is which, which will tell you where the actual error is. Usually, disk0s2 is the internal boot drive, by the way.

charlie
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error code -36 / problem w/ Lacie Porsche drive

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