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Moving Fat32 Files to a Mac OS Hard Drive
I have been searching for an answer to a problem and have had difficulty. Many posts seem Old so I thought I would see if there is a solution to this issue. When I started my current job, I used to edit video using Final Cut Studio. Our workflow, here, was to just take WD Passports and do our work on them. FCP had no problem capturing video or editing on the Fat32 drives, All worked just fine. However, now, I have a bag full of drives, Many 256 or 500gig that are full of FCP Projects. They along with many other Mac Formatted drives are disorganized and difficult to find stuff. I would like to move the contents over to larger drives and reorganize everything. Then back that all up somehow. But, With the Fat32 formatted drives, I encounter the difficulty that the Fat32 files CAN NOT be copied off the original drive.
Emphasis: I would like to move the material TO a MAC OS JOURNALED Drive. I do not intend to move any material back to the Fat32 drives.
Had I known back then that I would have such difficulty moving the material to another drive, I would have, as I do today, reformatted all my drives to MAC OS before I use them. For my editing, I don’t have to use the drives across platforms anyway. I have also moved most of my work to Mac Computers anyway, and don’t use PCs as much, anymore.
A thought came to mind but I assume it wouldn’t work. If I formatted a new drive to MAC OS and used a program like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the old drives to it, Would Cloner also change the format of the new drive to match that of the old? Or would it just say Can’t be done.
Any assistance or direction that anyone can offer would be appreciated.
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6 Replies
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Your Fat32 drives should be properly recognized and mounted on your modern Mac OS X system to the point that you can simply drag and drop your folders rom the old drives to the new volumes. We transfer files using this method all the time.
What errors are you running into specifically?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
I haven’t tried in a while but, I think, I have no problem accessing files from the drives,, using or viewing them etc. My problems come from moving them to the computer or another drive. Larger files, for example video files from the Capture Scratch are too large to move. I suppose, for example, I could open an old FCP project and save it to another drive. Or, maybe open a photo in Photoshop and Save As. However, as with FCP, while I may be able to move the PROJECT via SAVE AS, I would not have many of the associated assets on the new drive as they don’t move with the project and would be too large to transfer. Unless, you know a work around, which is what I would really like to know.
Perhaps, I will play with an old project and see where I, specifically have problems. I do know that, some time ago, when I simply tried to copy one drive to another, by dragging and dropping, it wouldn’t work.
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Make sure the destination drive is formatted as HFS+ and not one of the MS_DOS oriented formats. I’ve seen that where you tried to copy a file onto an MS_DOS centric filesystem and it failed due to the source file size.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
In fact, as I mentioned in my original post, I have been copying to a drive formatted Mac OS Extended. I will try again when I get a chance, see if I can come up with more specifics on the issues. I am pretty sure that the errors had to do with the fact that the source drive was Fat32.
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FAT32 formatted disks have a 2GB file size limit. The HFS+ Journaled format does not have this limitation.
Maybe you were trying to copy from HFS+ to FAT32 when you saw the errors? I frequently do Finder copies from FAT32 to HFS+ without issue.
When formatting a new drive, I’ll typically use Disk Utility and do the following:
1. Select the device (not the volume) in the list on the left
2. Open the “Partition” tab
3. For Partition Layout, select “1 Partition”
4. Select your Format – “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”
5. Click the “Options…” button below the partition layout view and choose “GUID Partition Table”
6. Click “Apply” in the lower right-hand cornerThere are a few drives that I do exchange with Windows users, and for those units I make 2 modifications to the above steps:
4. Select format “ExFAT”
5. Click the “Options…” button below the partition layout view and choose “Master Boot Record”I use ExFAT because it can handle files larger than 2GB.
One other thing I do is check the Finder Info for each Mac-formatted external drive and make sure “Ignore Ownership” is checked and applied to all enclosed files / folders. The option isn’t available on the Windows-formatted drives.
Doug Metz
Anode
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You know.a partition with FAT32 file system could NOT be put into a file which is larger than 4GB.i dont know you meant to move what file or whether it is over or under 4GB. ok .if its not .i think there is a writting-limit with the drive you were trring to move files to .just simply turn the writting-limit off.
If it is a result of file system.use a “partition wizard” to convert within secondsI wish it helps
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