Why am I unable to move a file?

fakie_flip · 08-25-2006, 02:03 PM

Code:

veronica@veronica-desktop:~/vmware/Windows XP Professional$ ls -lh
total 2.1G
-rw------- 1 veronica veronica 2.0G 2006-08-23 17:53 Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk
veronica@veronica-desktop:~/vmware/Windows XP Professional$ mv -v * /var/vmware/Windows\ XP\ Professional/
`Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk' -> `/var/vmware/Windows XP Professional/Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk'
mv: reading `Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk': Input/output error
veronica@veronica-desktop:~/vmware/Windows XP Professional$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              59G   23G   34G  41% /
varrun                379M  124K  379M   1% /var/run
varlock               379M  4.0K  379M   1% /var/lock
udev                  379M  144K  379M   1% /dev
devshm                379M     0  379M   0% /dev/shm
lrm                   379M   19M  361M   5% /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-386/volatile
/dev/hda1              55G   31G   22G  59% /home
/dev/hdb              641M  641M     0 100% /media/cdrom0
veronica@veronica-desktop:/var/vmware/Windows XP Professional$ ls -l /var/vmware/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 veronica veronica 4096 2006-08-24 09:47 Freespire
drwxr-xr-x 2 veronica veronica 4096 2006-08-25 03:23 Windows XP Professional
veronica@veronica-desktop:/var/vmware/Windows XP Professional$

ramram29 · 08-25-2006, 02:09 PM

Put the spaced directory in quotes like this:

mv -v * "/var/vmware/Windows\ XP\ Professional/"

zhangmaike · 08-25-2006, 03:22 PM

Those spaces are already escaped with \'s. No quotes are necessary. Adding quotes will cause further errors.

The input/output error leads me to believe that the media on which "Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk" is stored might have physical errors.

Try:

Code:

dd if="Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk" of=/dev/null

And see if you get an input/output error.

reddazz · 08-25-2006, 04:26 PM

I've moved this to the Linux General forum since its not really a software related question.

Matir · 08-26-2006, 10:53 AM

Also, look at dmesg to see if there are any messages indicating problems with your hard drive.

fakie_flip · 08-28-2006, 02:53 PM

That was my Window's XP install on VMware Server. It refused to move. Windows XP didn't like Linux, so I had to delete it and reinstall it. However, my Freespire install on VMware Server had no problem moving to a different partition and running from there.

zhangmaike · 08-28-2006, 03:05 PM

Did you try our suggestions? If so, what was the output?

A file doesn't "refuse to move" with an input/output error. An input/output error usually signals hardware or filesystem problems; it means that the OS could not physically read from / write to the disk at that location. Further, whether or not the OS installed in a file "likes" the currently running OS makes no difference in regards to whether or not that file can be moved.

Your filesystem may still have errors, or your disk may have bad blocks. Now that you've deleted the file, this will be harder to diagnose. I'd recommend running fsck on the potentially bad disk. If you use ext2 or ext3, you might want to try e2fsck with the -c option, which will also check for bad blocks.