Moving Bitcoin database to new harddrive without having to resync

[TropicalHenry]

Hello,

I have a fully synced and working download of the blockchain on an external hard drive and just want to move it all to a brand new external hard drive (as the old one has started making a click click death is imminent noise!). I thought it would be super simple bit am having problems.

I copied the whole bitcoin folder (containing blocks, chainstate etc) to the new external hard drive, started up BitcoinCore and pointed it at the new directory. I expected it to carry on as normal but it is trying to sync the whole blockchain again.

Why is it trying to sync all over again. Have i done something wrong. Am i bad person.

I have a garbage laptop and it took about 2 weeks of it being on 24 hours a day to sync last time, please dont make me do that again...

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[ABCbits]

Weird, usually it would detect the database and carry out normally (or verify whole blockchain again in very few cases).

Can you share your debug.log file? It's possible the database (blockchain files) got corrupted and Bitcoin Core decided to resync from scratch.

[TropicalHenry]

Corrupt data for the win!

I deleted and re-copied everything and it worked this time.

Thankyou for the help 

[xyzzy099]

Is it possible that you made  the copy while the clent was running?  I would imagine that if that is the case, the database would be being changed as your copy was taking place, possibly resulting in an inconsistency which would require a resync.

If you are going to make a copy of the blockchain, I think you would need to shut down, then copy.

Just guessing here :-)