New 2019 iMac Dropped USB drive.

[dcmaccam]

Hi, I have just purchased a 2019 iMac to replace my 2011 iMac and have been setting it up for the past few days. Tonight I was moving Time Machine backup files between two drives connected to the USB sockets.

After about 5 hrs one of the drive disconnected. I was if the plug had been pulled. Nothing was moved.

Anyone have similar problems?

Both drives we quite warm and I wonder if one overheated and disconnected. One drive is a WD Elements 1TB the other a Lacie 2TB which was the one that disconnected. Unplugged it and reconnected and ran first aid which revealed no problem.

Is there any log file I could look at to see what happened.

Started the copy again to see if the problem is repeatable

Cheers

 

[Fishrrman]

Are you "manually moving" things from the old one to the new one?

If so, I'd suggest you try moving them "in smaller chunks".

You've already started the migration, but if you had asked before migrating, my advice would have been:
- DON'T USE time machine
- instead, use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to created a cloned backup of the OLD drive
- Then, either use setup assistant when you first turn on the NEW iMac, or, do a "manual migration" a little-at-a-time.

It's much easier with a cloned backup to just plug it in and copy things manually, just as you would with any other drive.

 

[dcmaccam]

Hi Sorry. Didn't make myself clear. I have setup my new mac from scratch, reinstalled all my programs and everything appears to working. I have been using Time Machine for several years with no problem.

I had a 2TB USB backup drive from my previous machine(which I still have) that I wanted to keep the backups for this on another drive. So I was trying to transfer the backups from the 2TB to a 1TB drive. The 2TB has two partitions so I was going to wipe it and start backing up on this from scratch using Time Machine.

Now, the problem is it gets about 2/3 through the transfer and the 2TB drive (the one data is getting read from) seems to get ejected with the usual error message. Tried again overnight similar thing happened. I am trying to see if this is a drive or system fault. Only had the machine a week so concerned it was a problem with the system.

Unfortunately because of the vast number of files the transfer takes many hours before it fails.

I have moved the two drives to my old iMac and see if the same thing happens. If this works OK I will put them back in the other 2019 machine and try again. If it happens again I might return the system as it may be a hardware issue.

I the 6 years I have had my 2011 iMac I have never had a random disconnect.

Don't know of anything else to check.

 

[Fishrrman]

Assuming that the OLD Mac is still able to boot and run without problems, what I'd do:
1. Take the 1tb drive and ERASE IT to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format
2. Download CarbonCopyCloner from here:
Carbon Copy Cloner - Download
CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days, this costs you nothing
3. Use CCC to clone the contents of the OLD Mac to the 1tb drive.

And... that's all you need to do.
Put the backup drive into a safe place, and just... let it be.
A CCC clone is directly mountable in the finder on any Mac. You can copy one file, several files, a group of folders, or the whole shebang.
It will "look and feel" like ANY OTHER DRIVE, there's nothing special about it (except that it's bootable).
This way... the contents of the old Mac are "preserved", in finder format. Isn't this what you want?

One more thing:
Now you can also erase the 2tb drive, and use it for whatever new purpose that you wish.

 

[dcmaccam]

Hi , Thanks for the info. I will look into CCC. However I must apologise. I think I may have over complicated things. My original issue was trying to work out why on my new 2019 iMac my source USB drive disconnected at about 8000000 files when transferring 1300000 files to another USB drive. I was just trying to determine if my new iMac has a fault or if it was the drive.