Copying files to USB Freezing

So I have a PowerMac 8600/300 running OS 9.1. It has a Belkin 2 Port USB PCI card. The system profiler see’s it fine and see’s any USB or CF card as a volume on the USB BUS. It has the OPTI chip. Everything works great as far as mounting and seeing the correct size. If you try to copy to the drive a file of significant size or vice versa, it will end up freezing.. the last freeze it got to 4MB out of 200MB. You have to actually unplug the machine to reboot. Pressing the power button or force quitting ends in a blank white box.

The odd thing is if you use Disk Copy for example and make an image file of that 200MB Folder and save it to the pen or CF drive with disk copy it works fine!!! It saves the image just fine. I cannot figure out why you can’t just drag and drop files to it. I have tried formatting in either “standard” or “extended” and it doesn’t make a difference!

Ive been having this issue with CF cards on my PB G3 Wallstreet as well.

I’ve tried APS power tools for the disk formatting utility.. maybe I should try FWB Toolkit.. With APS I selected HFS+ with 512k setting.

I could swear I used to copy just fine… what am I doing wrong??

Thanks for any help!

Possibly an OS error? Have you tried with another OS on the same machine?

I’ve reinstalled.. I can try 8.6 and see if that works on the 8600 with the USB extensions.. but I have multiple SCSI drives and have tried when booted from all of them..

It’s crazy.. I’m imaging a copy of OS 9.1 Install now and it’s imaging and making the file fine on the USB stick! If I were to copy the folder forget it.. it would freeze after copying a little bit..

My termination is all correct too.. and it can’t be the mail logic board I’ve swapped them.. I’ve also swapped Belkin cards.. so maybe it’s an OS issue!

I find USB sticks often freeze and crash on OS 9.x machines if the same device was used a lot to copy files over from later Macs (eg. running a later version of OS X). Sometimes even inserting the drive into OS 9.x freezes the Mac or it takes a couple of minutes to come up on the desktop. Another thing I find is that some folders, files cannot be deleted or moved under Mac OS, citing permission issues.

My fix has usually been to format it on the late OS X machine, then plug it into the older Mac, format it again - this does the trick for a few months then it's time to repeat I presume it's due to differing permissions, hidden files, HFS standards.

You know I think your onto something Byrd!!! That would make sense since I move files from a G3 and the 8600 and a MacBook 2008 running OSX…. So strange.. I think I’ve even low level formatted it.. maybe zero all data! I just got to see if I can do that on my G3 OS 9.2 or the PM 8600. But I think you are right on spot here! It worked for a bit then I may have reformatted on the MacBook Pro.. But I have since then reformatted on the G3 or the 8600..

It’s crazy though. I can create an image file perfectly fine.. but not copy stuff over.. even the image file from another hdd.. I have to select to save it on the SD media..

I'm at the stage where my SCSI2SD V5.1 (the external one with the mini SD slot - in this case, 128GB card) - is due for a reformat, owing to file permission errors, this goes between PPC SCSI Macs and a Mac Pro 5.1 running a late version of OS X. I often use it to unstuff Stuffit archives, CD images, it's a mess and now refusing to let me delete certain folders.

The USB sticks I use are old 512MB - 2GB units on older Macs, same is used on DOS machines with different sticks.

Hey gang there has to be some reason this is freezing. I’ve tried all different scenarios from just now a fresh small install with USB extensions on an external drive. I’ve tried many others such as 9.2.1 & 9.2.2 updates… I used a new virgin SD card not touched by OS X and formatted with HFS Standard. This is driving me nuts! It can’t be the USB PCI card because I’ve tried 4 other cards.. all compatible. You can’t copy direct to an SD card. But if you were like I said to save it as an image through disk copy it works fine!! Or if you were to stuff something and save it just fine! So strange!!!! I mean you select the save destination as the SD card. You cannot drag and drop.

LaPorta said:

Possibly an OS error? Have you tried with another OS on the same machine?

Click to expand...

Not an OS error and not even a hardware error.. I’ve even used an entirely different logic board! And four different and same pci usb cards!!

Maybe I’ll try OS 8.1, 5, and 6? All versions of 9 don’t work.

Well I figured it out after hours and hours so hopefully this thread will help someone!! I had to remove all the OS 8.6, OS 9.1, or 9.2 USB extensions and install “USB Card Support 1.3.5” in order to be able to drag and drop. It’s very slow but it no longer freezes.