Access to attachments ok on USB drive but broken on hard drive

mgpapp
I am using Zotero 1.5b2 and Firefox 3.0.7-1 in Fedora 9 i686.
I have Zotero running fine, with pdf attachments, from a USB drive.

When I copy the zotero directory to the hard drive, with:
>> cp -ax /media/USB_8GB/zotero .
... change the Storage Location in Prefferences:Advanced, and restart Firefox, the database loads fine, but all access to attachments fail with the message:

"The attached file could not be found.
It may have been moved or deleted outside of Zotero."

If I click the Locate button and locate the file manually, then double click on the attachment again, I receive the same error message.

I do have permission to access all the files in the directory:
[mgpapp@sound ~]$ ls -l zotero
total 126628
drwxr-xr-x 2 mgpapp mgpapp 4096 2009-03-02 07:36 back
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 709964 2009-02-27 21:03 pdfinfo-Linux-i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 7 2009-02-27 21:03 pdfinfo-Linux-i686.version
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 1237894 2009-02-27 21:03 pdftotext-Linux-i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 7 2009-02-27 21:03 pdftotext-Linux-i686.version
drwxr-xr-x 191 mgpapp mgpapp 4096 2009-03-09 15:13 storage
drwxr-xr-x 3 mgpapp mgpapp 4096 2009-04-01 10:32 styles
drwxr-xr-x 2 mgpapp mgpapp 4096 2009-03-02 07:34 temp
drwxr-xr-x 2 mgpapp mgpapp 16384 2009-03-19 15:13 translators
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 32088064 2009-04-01 10:32 zotero.sqlite
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 32088064 2009-03-23 09:17 zotero.sqlite.1.bak
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 31244288 2009-02-27 21:03 zotero.sqlite.47.bak
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 32088064 2009-04-01 10:33 zotero.sqlite.bak
-rw-r--r-- 1 mgpapp mgpapp 4640 2009-04-01 10:32 zotero.sqlite-journal

[mgpapp@sound ~]$ ls -l zotero/storage/zxvpfdti/
total 1172
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mgpapp mgpapp 1193239 2009-02-28 22:21 fulltext.pdf

The problem started after updating the database to sync preview.

Any pointers will be very welcome!
  • noksagt
    Your issue might be related to this thread:
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6386
    Attachments work fine for me in Linux, though.
    ls -l zotero/storage/zxvpfdti/
    My storage directories are in all caps. My guess is that when you copied from your USB stick (which is likely formatted as FAT, a case-insensitive file system) to your hard drive (which is likely a case-sensitve file system), your filenames (all lowercase) no longer match your database (mixed case).
  • mgpapp
    noksagt, you are right! The issue is that the database lists the storage directories in all caps, but the filesystem lists them as small caps.

    This machine has an ext3 drive, an ntfs drive and the USB drive is formatted as FAT. In Linux, Zotero can access its attachments from the USB drive, but not from the ntfs or ext3 drives.

    I would like to be able to use the Zotero database in Windows and Linux, from any of the 3 filesystems. What is the sensible approach? It seems that I would need a script to convert the storage directory names only from all caps to small caps every time that I copy the zotero folder from FAT to the other filesystems?

    By the way, the case in the filenames is mantained when copying the storage folder across filesystems. So why is only the case of the storage folder names being altered?

    Thank you!
  • ali
    Strange thing for me. My storage folder is on the FAT32 partition. From windows the names of folders are all caps, and in linux they they appear as small caps. Should I just rename the folders while in linux?
  • noksagt
    What distro(s) are you using? And what desktop environments? In gnome, you might be able to launch gconf-editor & edit /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options to include 'shortname=mixed'. (In other systems, you can try providing this option when you manually mount the system as root on the command line or add it to your /etc/fstab.)
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