Greetings...
I am consolidating files from various drives and machines and have noticed all the audio and image files I copied from one old drive to my new drive have come across with what appear to be Chinese file names. I have had these files forever, and never have they ever been in Chinese. What has happened and how can I rename them in English? Attached (hopefully) is a screenshot of the anomaly.
Zorin 17.2 Core
TIA,
Zed
I can't say that I have the faintest idea of what's going on here... let's start with some baseline questions:
Before you copied the contents from the old drive, were you able to read the filenames normally?
What is the filesystem used in those drives? You can verify this by plugging them in, launching Disks from the applications menu and click on each drive shown in the sidebar.
As shown in the screenshot, you can see each of the drive's partitions. Right under the "Partition X" text, the partition name e.g., FAT, Ext4, ...
Are you able to copy the same files (or just a few of them) to another computer to check if you see the same issue over there? This would confirm an issue with the drive itself, in which case I'd recommend making copies as soon as possible in case you're seeing symptoms of hardware failure.
Wow, interesting Behavior. Sorry, for You an Issue, I know. But I never saw something like this.
Okay, what System Language do You use? Does anyone had access to Your old Drive? Did the Files look on the Drive like this, too? Did You check the Files for Viruses only for the Case?
I would think that this was an encoding corruption.
If the old drive was an old NTFS version or the drive was corrupt, this could explain this very odd behavior.
Open a terminal within the affected directory using cd command to navigate to that path or using the Nautilus Admin addon to gain the "Open in terminal" on right click
Then run
ls -b
You can relay the results here for us to look for filenames with non-ASCII characters as escaped sequences.
You might be able to get the original filenames by using convmv package to rename the filenames in UTF-8. I would need to look up a guide as I do not know the steps, or you can check the manpages for convmv.
