Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

[dimmutal]

Hi there! I bought an external 500GB hard drive to backup my files. I copied from my hard drives thousands of folders and songs with Greek filenames, and when they were copied in the external drive their filenames were corrupted!! Any ideas how to fix this and why it happened?

[askrieger]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

I have a vague idea why this might have happened, but I'm not sure how to fix it. My guess is that the filesystem on the external drive is set up to use filenames in a particular character encoding, e.g. utf-8, while your filenames use a different character encoding, e.g. iso-8859-?, utf-16, or (most likely) whatever encoding M$ uses for Hellenic characters.

If this is the case, then the only solution that I can think of immediately is very drastic. You must re-format the external drive to use a file system that understands the character encoding that YOU use. Obviously, if you do this you will lose everything that is presently on the external drive.

[dimmutal]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

My disk is formatted in FAT32, and i can't format it, since i'm talking about 350GB of data which i have nowhere to backup.

[walfred]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

Hi dimmutal
well, I'm not sure how to help you neither. It would help a better description of your situation, for instance
- have you copied those files to your backup HD under Linux or Windows or even both?
- when you see corrupted names, where is it? Linux or Windows?

I'm Brazilian and for pt_BR, Windows uses ISO-8859-1 as default. So copying files from FAT32 to whatever Linux format (I use ext3 and xfs), I fix them running 'iconv'

Please have a look on 'iconv --help' and 'iconv -l' with no quotes, of course.

One last thing, any partition bigger than 32GB is a waste for FAT32. I think you should consider using NTFS for Windows or EXT3 for Linux. Just an advise.

Good luck

[dimmutal]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

Ok, mainly we are talking about songs and movies. They were in a disk which has my Windows installation and in another disk formmated in NTFS. My external drive is FAT32. When i copied them in my external drives all the Greek filenames were corrupted. I'm talking about thousands of songs so it is almost not possible to rename them each one of them...

I have my external drive formated in FAT32 because it seems that Kubuntu doesn't really like the NTFS for external drives. I get some sort of instability. So i had it formated in FAT32. Any ideas? Honestly, it is a difficult situation because the files are thousands and thousands of them...

[Teunis]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

I have no solution to the naming problem but I can tell you that since the 3g NTFS drivers became available I've never had a problem with NTFS disks and Linux.
But these days I format my own disks in ext2/3 as there is the ext2ifs plug-in that makes Windows understand them.
Back to the naming issue, have you tried to copy the files back to a similar system?

[dibl]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

I have my external drive formated in FAT32 because it seems that Kubuntu doesn't really like the NTFS for external drives. I get some sort of instability. So i had it formated in FAT32. Any ideas?

Kubuntu (or any other recent Linux distribution) should not have any problem with NTFS-formatted hard drives, using the ntfs-3g package.

HOWEVER, NTFS is a journaling filesystem, and you cannot just pull the connector out of the USB port without first doing a "safely remove" or "eject" in the OS. That's where people get in trouble with NTFS-formatted external USB hard drives -- they get corrupted because of unwritten or partially-written data that was still in cache when the plug was pulled.

I would say boot a good Live CD (Kubuntu should work, or Knoppix, or Sidux) and start backing up that music to DVDs. Then I would format the external drive back to NTFS, and set up Kubuntu with ntfs-3g to use it, and just don't forget to "safely remove" before you yank the plug on the drive, when the computer is running.

[Teunis]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

dibl's last post reminded me of one time I pulled a USB stick too soon, the result was illegible file names...
Do I see I connection to the Original Problem?

[dimmutal]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

Partly solved the problem.

I edited the fsatb file, reconnected the drive and everything works ok, but only under root privileges. The filenames are displayed correctly, and i can write to the disk as usual, but only if i open dolphin or konqueror as root. Here is the fstab file in case someone has an idea how to correct things for non-root use of my disk.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>  <type> <options>    <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb6
UUID=1ae7f179-6837-4c78-a63b-7282e5a75312 / ext3 nouser,defaults,errors=remount-ro,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 1
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=d35f1a89-05c8-4225-9e71-8ea7c245eb2b /home ext3 nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# /dev/sda1
UUID=F008326908322ECA /media/sda1 ntfs defaults,umask=007,uid=0,gid=46,auto,rw,nouser 0 1
# /dev/sdc1
# /media/sdc1 ntfs defaults,umask=007,loop,uid=1000,gid=46,auto,rw,users 0 1
# /dev/sdb5
UUID=3ffe8539-e328-4041-84a4-c888cfe066e0 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto user,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 auto users,atime,auto,rw,nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sde1 /media/sdd1 auto users,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0

[toad]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

I take it it is /media/sdc1 you are talking about. Have you checked permissions of that directory? Most likely that will solve your problem...

[dimmutal]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

It's the /media/sde1/ but i'll check the permissions and i'll feedback.

[askrieger]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

Um,err; your fstab shows /dev/sde1 mounted at /media/sdd1. That probably doesn't matter, but ...

[toad]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

lol - I hadn't noticed that

[dimmutal]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

Anyway, i formatted my pc for some other reasons, and still the same thing happens. My fstab now looks like this:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>  <type> <options>    <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb6
UUID=67ae2bb3-2601-4d94-9218-6154ff3b1760 / ext3 nouser,relatime,errors=remount-ro,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 1
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=be1c2b17-7fa5-4175-9d97-2dd034f8a62d /home ext3 nouser,relatime,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# /dev/sdb5
UUID=3ffe8539-e328-4041-84a4-c888cfe066e0 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,utf8,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto user,utf8,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 auto users,atime,auto,rw,nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 auto users,atime,auto,rw,nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sdd1 /media/sdd1 auto users,auto,atime,rw,nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0

The hard drive is the sdd1. I cannot change the permissions of the sdd1 folder, thus i cannot write to the drive, unless i enter in dolphin in root mode.

[toad]

Re: Corrupted filenames in external hard drive

Don't worry. Please use the command line, 'cos it is easier to give you commands rather than guide you through an eternity of clicks.

So, open your command line, do a

cd /media

Now do a

ls -l

and post the output. Simple, and we (and you) know your permissions. Depending on what you post your solution may only be a couple of commands away 8)