Mac OS 9 File Copying Error

[30111987]

This occurs when copying a folder (containing about 1200 files - mostly appleworks, word, filemaker pro files) from the desktop to a USB Flash Drive


The item "filename" cannot be written, because an item with that name already exists. Do you want to continue?
|STOP| |Continue|


Clicking stop OR continue results in the system to stop copying and leave what has already been copied sitting on the usb flash drive.

This seems to dislike random files, not ones with weird file names or anything. If I take the file out of the folder. I can restart the copy process and the folder copies until it decides not to like another file. The file it complained about can be copied to the usb drive fine if I copy it by itself!

This is using a blank USB Drive so the file certainly isn't already on the drive (as the error suggests).

It is really annoying because there's a lot of files involved so its very time consuming when it stops at say file 900 after having been copying for the past 10 minutes...

Oh why can't it be like Windows in this case and offer to overwrite the file or skip it?

[Buzz]

How long are the file names? Any over 31 characters?

Of course the obvious is if any of the files have the same name.

When I encounter this it's almost always a duplicate file name.
In some extreme cases a file name is too long for the FAT formatting of most USB pen drives.

[30111987]

nope all of the files rejected have short file names with no illegal characters.

There is defiantly not already files with the same name on the pen drive, I've been using it from a fresh start. It happily copies the file if I select it by itself its just when I'm copying the whole folder (containing about 1200 files) it has problems.

[Buzz]

You may simply be pushing the limits of the copy function in some way. All I can really suggest is to copy batches of several dozen files at a time rather than the entire folder, but you've probably figured that out already.

Sounds like a bit of USB voodoo.

[30111987]

Yeah I'm putting it down to the fact that MacOS 9 was kinda pre USB Flash Drives.