I am a computer literate (retired programmer) Windows user trying to help a non-computer literate friend move all of the files from an old external hard drive to a new external drive. I copied the files from the old drive to the new drive using FreeFileSync. All of the files copied except 15 which generated the error "Error code 13 Permission denied". I restarted the system, tried again and got the same error. I then tried to copy the files in Finder. When I selected Copy from the menu the spinning progress indicator started and never stopped. I was not able to select a destination folder. I looked at the permissions for one of the files and the permissions showed that the user has read-write permission. Can anyone suggest how to diagnose and fix this problem? Thanks.
Error code 13 Permission denied when copying files
- Thread starter Bazsl
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Cory Cooper
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Hello and welcome.
-Which version of OS X?
-How are the drives formatted?
-Have you checked the file properties using Get Info?
-Have you tried copying them directly in Finder, instead of using FreeFileSync?
C
-Which version of OS X?
-How are the drives formatted?
-Have you checked the file properties using Get Info?
-Have you tried copying them directly in Finder, instead of using FreeFileSync?
C
Cory Cooper
Moderator
- Joined
- May 19, 2004
- Messages
- 11,106
- Reaction score
- 497
Normally, if Finder hangs when copying files, it means there is a read/write error on one of the drives. That is, the hard drive is failing. Are you having any other issues with hanging/freezing?
C
C
Thanks for your reply. There was an error in my last message. The files are not on the internal drive on the iMac. They are on an external USB 2.0 drive that is formatted HPS. The error occurred when copying all of the files from the USB 2.0 external drive to a new larger Thunderbolt RAID 1 drive. Over 50,000 files where copied without error using FreeFileSync in four and one half hours. Only about 15 files produced the error. The files that produced the error are all in a single folder but they are not the only files in that folder. The error is reproducible and always occurs on the same files.
As I said in my original post, I am a Windows user trying to help a friend so I am not Mac literate. However, it seems odd to me that a drive failure would cause such a reproducible problem. Do you think enabling root and trying to copy the files as root might help? I assume that will work if this is really a permissions problem.
As I said in my original post, I am a Windows user trying to help a friend so I am not Mac literate. However, it seems odd to me that a drive failure would cause such a reproducible problem. Do you think enabling root and trying to copy the files as root might help? I assume that will work if this is really a permissions problem.