How do I fix error -36?

See I/O error -36 « fuzzybrain|daisychain|blogdrain

There's more to the article than Disk Utility.

Error -36 is a disk error, and it indicates that the directory of the volume you were copying from became corrupt as the result of a drive malfunction. Sometimes the error is spurious and can be cured merely by rebooting. I suggest you try that first. If that doesn't help, you need to repair the volume by selecting it in Disk Utility and running "Repair Disk" (not "Repair Permissions.") If the volume in question is your boot volume, then I suggest you boot in safe mode, then immediately reboot as usual (i.e., not in safe mode.) That will cause the directory to be repaired, if possible, and also will cause certain system caches to be rebuilt. Even after you've taken these steps, it's possible that the file you were unable to copy will be damaged. In that case, you'll have to restore it from a backup, if you have one, made before the file was damaged.

kainredux wrote:

They are all sources to help with DVD's and transfering media from them. I'm not using a DVD.

Understood. I read the article and I see what Kappy means. For example:

In some cases the error is symptomatic of bad media. If the error occurs whilst copying from one hard disk to another, then you probably do have bad media.

That is definitely true of -36 errors in general, not just DVDs. It has been true of hard drives and going back to the old floppy drives. -36 means something cannot be read or written, possibly because a sector on the hard drive has gone bad. And that sector may not be involved in a simple mounting operation.

Such denials/failures are sometimes non-explicit. Think of a dirty/scratched CD: there’s nothing on it to say that it’s dirty, it’s just troublesome to work with (the computer doesn’t “get it”). So, we have generic error -36 and it’s up to us to guess or figure out the explanation...Whilst Disk Utility handles metadata it does not necessarily verify the integrity or readability of data (your files), nor does it check for bad blocks.

Again - also true of hard drives. If the cause of a -36 is not clear, then it can be very difficult to figure out what it is. So what would I do in this situation? I might try several different ways of copying, maybe with different software, in the hope that one might have some kind of error correction that would help. But if none of them work, probably the next reasonable thing to do is restore the last good backup copy of that file, because it's very possible that it's going to be difficult or impossible for me as an individual non-programmer to figure out and fix what is exactly wrong with the file that is causing the error. Even if I could find the "bad block" on the hard drive that got corrupted, I wouldn't know how to fix it. Easier and faster to use my backup for what it's for.