individual folders on my hd are appearing twice in Imatch.

[CollieDog]

Hi,
I have a weird new problem.

On my NTFS harddrive, I store my photos in folders with this structure

2017
     2017-01-Jan-23 family
     2017-02-Feb-05 landscapes
     2017-05-May-15 research
     2017-07-July-29 renovations

2018 Photos
     2018-01-Jan-12 dog
     2018-02-Feb-17 houses
     2018-05-May-30 party
     2018-07-July-03 beach

As well all know, dragging these folders into IMatch, creates a similar folder structure within IMatch which I used to manage all of my images.

Recently I noticed that several folders are appearing twice in IMatch. I have two folders of 2018 Photos and two folders of 2017 Photos. The contents of both of the 2018 Photos folder are not a mirror duplicates.  One contains 11,313 images, the other 6,513 images. The equally mysterious two 2017 folders shows a similar discrepancy. Why did these partially-duplicated folders appear?

I suspect the problem has to do with my system setup.
I run IMatch 2017 in a Windows 10 virtual machine inside Manjaro Linux. My IMatch catalogue is located on an SSD drive. The photos are stored on an NTFS formatted harddrive in my computer case.
Is this mess being caused by some sort of permissions problem or file identification marker?

I tried compacting my database and re-scanning the harddrive. But neither process solved the problem.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[Mario]

The only known way for this to happen is if a user adds the same folders twice, e.g. after changing hard disks or moving the files manually outside of IMatch instead of using Relocate.

See this post https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=8035.msg56405#msg56405 for details and instructions on how to fix this. Make a  Backup of your database before.

[CollieDog]

I found that the problem occurred when I moved the files off my NTFS drives, converted the filesystem to EXT4, and copied the files back onto the drive.
The folders on the drive were somehow counted twice by IMatch, probably when I did  a 'rescan' of the drive.

I fixed the problem by using the RELOCATE feature to reassign the folder to its proper location on the new drive. For other erroneous folders, I used "remove from database".

Everything seems to be functioning perfectly again.

[Carlo Didier]

Reformating a disk changes the disk id and therefore it's a different disk for iMatch. Hence, you need to relocate instead re-scanning.

[CollieDog]

Thanks everyone! The problem is solved and IMatch is now working very smoothly in a Win guest Virtual Machine