Move DVD from windows to LinuxMCE

[chipppy]

I have my LinuxMCE hybrid up and running without any problem (touch wood it stays that way).
I have two harddrives 1st for application + music, 2nd for video.
I currently have all the kids DVd and videos stored on my Wuindows machine approxs 120 or about 500GB worth.  (Yes the kids are spoilt)

Simple question hopefully.
How can I transfer from windows (NTFS) 500GB hard drive to LinuxMCE 1TB hard drive?
I would prefer not to have to get all the orginals out and rip them again as that will take forever with mesitting at the computer.
I have a 250GB & 500GB USB postable, as well as a 8GB USB stick that i can use, and I am planning on transfering the Window 500GB harddrive to the LinuxMCE in the end so moving it over is not an issue.

Cheers
Chipppy

[colinjones]

Can you not just take the NTFS drive out of the Windows machine temporarily and plug it into the hybrid? This would, by far, be the fastest way of doing it.

If so, unshare the Windows folder and turn off the Windows machine
In the web admin, in Media Sync turn on the missing files check box
Delete the entire folder structure that contained the media on the Windows machine.
Put the drive into the hybrid - note you can actually do this whilst the machine is on if it is SATA as SATA is hotplugable
Tell LMCE not to use the drive.
Now use either the command line or KDE desktop to transfer all the media to the correct hybrid drive location
After a while, UpdateMedia will scan in this media
Transfer the drive back to the Windows system.
Remember to clean up LMCE by deleting the share "device" in the admin site

[patmankn]

Hmm.. can't you just move the file via the network? Its not really the quickest way (sata pretty much kicks 1gbit networks ass! ;O), but that way you do not have to mess with your win box. keep in mind that with 100mbit you can get 8-12mb/sek, gbit will give you round about 20-30mb/sek. Colins way will be aprox. 60-80 mbyte/sek.

pat

[colinjones]

I assumed he wanted to avoid the network because of the time inolved. I would estimate that this quantity of data would take a bit under 4 hours to move on a gig network assuming around 300Mb/s. Fastethernet would be impractical for such a large amount of data....

[skeptic]

I get about a half a gig a minute between a windoze box and LMCE using the samba share.  That comes up to almost 17 hours across a 100Mbps network.  USB 2.0 is rated at almost 5 times faster, but I'm not sure how that translates into real world speed.  My guess is that it's better than 5x the speed, but since you have to copy the files twice you are looking at somewhere between half and one third the time (guestimate). 

Honestly, I'd probably just kick off a network copy one evening and it would be finished some time the next day.

[chipppy]

Thanks for the help.

First I am a noob and as such i dont have the two machines networked.  Still need to learn how to do that.  If they were then it would be a slower connection as the Windoze machine is a 2000 vintage.

Next I tried the USB Idea with 1 file to test.  I realise that this is slow but it is still faster then ripping the DVDs.  I was thinking along the same lines as skeptic's idea of set it up and let it run one night.
Once I cleared out the USB HDD and copied the 1 file I connected to my LCME box.  It can up with an error relating to the NTFS formated not Linux formated.  I did this via KDE and it mentioned about doing a forced mount via the command line.  Read the help file a bit and dont fully understand what to do and how as I am new to the command line stuff. 
I am not to worried if I bugger up the data on the USB HDD as this is just a copy but I am concerned about stuffing something in the LMCE.  (I have had any problems yet and I dont want to test my luck, as the TV and PVR side of things is working great [touch wood])

Can anyone help me through this little bit.

Cheers
Chipppy

[colinjones]

I have no idea what that error is about - LMCE is perfectly capable of reading and writing to NTFS drives. Never manually mount anything in LMCE, you will break it. You should just be able to plug in the drive in LMCE (not KDE) and it will detect it and ask you questions about using it. Once it has mounted the drive for you, then you should be able to drag and drop within KDE

[itsmeok]

As a newbie to LinuxMCE I would do the following procedure if you use the USB approach. I wonder if this would be a good approach so please shoot at the idea.

Plug the USB stick.
tell MCE to leave the drive alone
Go to KDE desktop and copy the content to a LinuxMCE video folder and wait for it to be scanned
Go back into MCE and open through Video

If you have iso files you want to rename them to .dvd I quess.

Through the network I connect from file explorer and copy content to MCE file structure on the system.

Worked for me but as being newbee let me know if this brings me in trouble

[Dale_K]

I have always copied from my windows box to the LMCE box over the network from the Windows box (\\dcerouter in explorer brings up the Core).  It is slower, but very little chance of screwing up the system.