[Drew1369]

Is there anyway to bypass name lengths when transfering files that were on a lacie drive to a Maxtor (first experince with both Lacie and Maxtor)? There is about 55k files on the lacie and there is no way of going thru and renaming the files the Maxtor wont accept because of the name length.


Now I did set it up on a PC instead of a Mac so I'm also wondering if that was the problem?

 

[TheMatt]

What file name limit are you talking about? Do you get an error?

 

[Drew1369]

Cannot copy the item * because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display.

 

[TheMatt]

What are the file systems of both the drives?

 

[Drew1369]

Well after speanding half the day playing with it and the 1 hour wait time trying to get to their tech support I came to realize that Maxtor is a linux based op system, and like windows they have the 255 character limit that the one and only thing Mac was smart enough to fix.


Now its not the file itsself that is 255 characters, but remeber that Windows and Linux take the root of the file as well which is what is exceeding the limit.

 

[TheMatt]

If you are trying to copy any file path from Linux or Windows, the Mac probably won't recognize it as valid. Is the posted message is on the Mac machine?

I am assuming that the Linux hard disk is Ext2 or Ext3 (the linux OS). So these are on a PC running Linux? Because Linux will not recognize a hard disk with any Mac OS as far as I know.

 

[Drew1369]

The Maxtor Shared Storage 2 external HD runs a Linux based op system... nothing else in the building does.


The HD will accept any files as long as the file is not over 255 character limit starting at the root no matter what operating system its coming from.

 

[TheMatt]

Can you put these files on a flash drive or other removable drive and then copy them onto the target hard drive.

 

[Drew1369]

Even a flash drive has the 255 character limit...

 

[TheMatt]

Try moving these files to a higher directory and/or renaming them so the name is shorter. I believe there was a utility in linux that allowed a mass rename of files, I will check it out.

 

[Drew1369]

A mass renaming would be great... but there are 55k+ files on the current external drive (lacie) and that would be damn near impossible to go thru all the files to move them, unless I spend a good month going thru the whole thing...

the only problem with that is the dept. that uses it constantly access the drive, so to take it away from the would not be a god thing.

 

[TheMatt]

There are a couple of command line utilities, but it is easier to use GUI programs. There are a couple, I use KRename for KDE. There is also Mrename, PrefixSuffix, and RenameUtils. You can download these from the package manager. Here is a screenshot I took, which was just a test. You can mass rename move, and copy files. You should try moving the files to a higher directory since that will be easier, but you can also rename files.



If you perfer the command line, check out the mmv command that you can add. It allows renaming with wildcards.
http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/mmv.html

 

[Drew1369]

I will give this a shot and let ya know... thanks for your help!

 

[Drew1369]

Well unfortunatly I was told to return it... my company has no patience with technology...

I do appreciate your help and will have those linksonthe backburner incase (and more then likly) this happens again!