Overclock.net banner

can moving files corrupt or ruin them?

693 Views 12 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  noob with an rs
im planning to transfer about 100 gigs of files to a hard drive that my friend is going to let me borrow. (So i can format my hard drive, re-install windows xp and vista, then transfer files back). about 30 gigs are MP3 and I transferred them from an older hard drive i had a while back. is it possible files can get worse or become corrupt if they are transferred from hard drive to hard drive a lot? the hard drive im going to borrow is the same hard drive as mine.
1 - 13 of 13 Posts
yea what he said. I would copy them though, seems to work faster, and no issues if you crash in the middle of something.
Quote:

Originally Posted by The Fury View Post
No it will be fine.
You can't say that for definite? I've had files corrupt on me before when the drives aren't formatted identically. Make sure you format the host drive to whatever the present drive is and don't do a quick reformat (i.e NTFS) also are the drives SATA? Are you overclocking on the system that you will be moving the files on? Has the person who owns the backup drive, if it is SATA, ever accidentally plugged in both the SATA and legacy power connectors and powered up? Have you enabled SMART on the drive and done an extensive test of the backup drive in Speedfan?

There are a number of factors which may lead to data corruption, also before you move a large amount of data from one drive to another make sure to disable NCQ and TCQ it is known to cause data corruption on NF4 chipsets.
See less See more
Well you bodged something up then.

I put all my music and games on my sata. Re-formated my maxtor with quick format and just cut and pasted them back over. If its corrupted you have done something wrong.
Just copy them, check if the copy is OK, and format the HDD you wanted to format...
You will be fine. Your data can be corrupted though from compressing and decompressing over and over though.
I've done a full hard drive backup and clean install once and it worked fine, no data corruption at all. However, a word of warning, sometimes when you are copying files over, and windows can't quite access a file for some reason, the whole copy operation in aborted, leaving you with half of it copied and half of it not. Therefore, don't do a direct transfer at first, copy it, make sure you have everything, then you can delete/ format your original hard drive.
Quote:

Originally Posted by The Fury View Post
Well you bodged something up then.

I put all my music and games on my sata. Re-formated my maxtor with quick format and just cut and pasted them back over. If its corrupted you have done something wrong.
Not necessarily. I don't think this problem is as prevalent with DFI boards, as I haven't had any issues as yet with mine. But I definitely had problems with my previous ASUS and ABIT NF4 boards. Check out the nvidia forums, there are loads of people with these corruption problems. Just do a search for "corruption" in the "nforce mobos" section and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not bodging anything up, this is a known problem that has plagued nforce since nf2. You might of just been lucky, or you aren't moving massive amounts of data at a time to cause the corruption to start.

Here is one of the longer threads concerned with it, it also outlines methods to test if your computer is suffering from this problem. It also notes that Maxtor drives in particular are prone to these problems with nforce chipsets.
See less See more
Quote:

Originally Posted by leimrod View Post
Make sure you format the host drive to whatever the present drive is and don't do a quick reformat (i.e NTFS)
NTFS does not mean a quick format. You should be doing a NTFS COMPLETE format. Do not use FAT32 formatting.
See less See more
Quote:

Originally Posted by leimrod View Post
Not necessarily. I don't think this problem is as prevalent with DFI boards, as I haven't had any issues as yet with mine. But I definitely had problems with my previous ASUS and ABIT NF4 boards. Check out the nvidia forums, there are loads of people with these corruption problems. Just do a search for "corruption" in the "nforce mobos" section and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not bodging anything up, this is a known problem that has plagued nforce since nf2. You might of just been lucky, or you aren't moving massive amounts of data at a time to cause the corruption to start.

Here is one of the longer threads concerned with it, it also outlines methods to test if your computer is suffering from this problem. It also notes that Maxtor drives in particular are prone to these problems with nforce chipsets.
Cool. I honestly didnt know that. I transferred 40gb in one big go. lol!!

Also the majority of those are linked to Maxtor HDD. They guy here has Seagate.

The simple way is just to transfer a bit at a time.
See less See more
Quote:

Originally Posted by timsvpr View Post
NTFS does not mean a quick format. You should be doing a NTFS COMPLETE format. Do not use FAT32 formatting.
Sorry I think you misread, the "i.e." was an example of the format to use not the method of formatting. I should really of put it in the middle of the sentence than at the end, my bad


Oh and the fury, yeah i've had problems with my WD's causing corruption, although since moving to DFI I can't say i've suffered from anything. DFI's really are superior mainboards, in a lot of ways most users probably won't appreciate. Also as long as the individual files are quiet small there doesn't seem to be a lot of fragmentation. I only seem to get it when moving 5gig ISOs around, and large video files.
See less See more
2
yea a lot of the files ill be moving are 7 gig ISO files..
1 - 13 of 13 Posts
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top