Having a hard time transferring files over samba

robmcc83 · February 11, 2019 at 9:29 PM

Hi all,

Not long got myself a new hard drive and having a strange problem transferring videos files from my win10 pc to WD passport 2tb hard drive connected to my raspberry pi3.

A little background first,

I had been using the same setup with a WD passport 1tb formatted in ext4 no problems at all. After ripping all the kids dvds to MP4 and copying them over the drive started to become quite full and I hadn't even started on mine and the wife's TV box sets.

So I purchased the exact same drive but 2tb.

I have a backup of all movies I ripped on the home computer, a windows 10 machine so started to copy them over to the new 2tb hard drive which I have checked for errors and formatted to ext4.

After selecting a few films it reaches near the end of transferring and says that files already exist, the options are skip, overwrite or cancel

If I click skip I get left with some video files at 0kb.

If i click overwrite it tells me I don't have permission.

So if I click skip and then try and delete the 0kb files so I can try and transfer them again it tells me I don't have permission, so I'm now stuck with 0kb files I can't delete.

I can delete rename etc any file that has copied successful.

Anybody know what this is.

I'm using a pi3 with latest libreelec version

Thanks

Rob

**Iridium** · February 12, 2019 at 5:46 PM Official Post

Personally (and I've had the same issue or similar) you are taking the wrong approach.

I would format the drive as NTFS and copy the majority of your files directly from your windows machine via USB3 (It will be a lot faster).

Once connected to the RPi3 use SFTP via something like filezilla to sftp your new files from your Win10 machine to your RPi3 over the network.

As to the actual samba error/issue I'm not too sure.

robmcc83 · February 13, 2019 at 11:23 AM

Ive had bad experiences in the past with NTFS on the raspberry pi that's why I use ext4 all the time now.

When using NTFS the pi runs alot hotter than it does using ext4 when writing to the external drive. I've had it crash several times using NTFS because of this when trying to copy stuff over.

I have now solved the problem by dual booting my computer so that I have Linux on it as well.

I have formatted the drive under Linux with ext4 then copied my stuff over to the drive that way.

Everything seems to have gone smoothly and is now back up and running.

I just wonder if the pi was not quite capable enough for my to transfer my 760gb of media over samba lol.

Probably my fault pushing it to much.

Thanks anyway.

robmcc83 · February 14, 2019 at 10:05 AM

Further more to this problem just incase anybody else gets this.

With a freshly formatted ext4 external hard drive, the first time you connect it to libreelec there is constant hard drive activity for approx 4 hours on a 2tb external hard drive.

I can only assume Linux does some sort of scan of the drive when a new formatted drive is mounted.

The same happens when using a Linux distro on my home computer only it only takes 10 minutes to do the same.

So conclusion is use a computer before hand to setup the hard drive with Linux, if this is not possible connect your hard drive to your raspberry pi and leave it over night or until there is no hard drive activity.

After that I can copy whatever over samba without issues and the transfer speed also becomes faster as the drive is no long active with other processes.

Hope this helps others