OT: Alt to Win Copy to move My Doc's to new PC?

will-3 wrote on 8/14/2008, 7:24 AM

I know this off topic but maybe others will find the answer to this useful...

I'm trying to move 60GB of files from an old PC to a new one...

The Windows "Copy" command aborts when it runs into file names that are to long... and doesn't tell you where to pick it back up.

You can spend hours... if not day's trying to copy the 60GB... each time the Copy aborts you have to find the offending file and then start the copy over again.

I need a simple way to copy massive amounts of files in many folders/directories from one disk to another.

Thanks for any help on this.

Comments

TeetimeNC wrote on 8/14/2008, 8:09 AM

I am using Windows XP Pro and have copied 60Gb or more with long file names without problem. This is on a slow Pentium 4 with 2Gb memory. What is your OS and configuration? Are you copying across a network? If so, you might try temporarily installing your old PC's HD in your new PC as a 2nd HD and do the copy there. Or install it as an external USB drive to the new PC and do the copy.

Jerry

johnmeyer wrote on 8/14/2008, 8:49 AM

I have run into this before, although the problem usually only happens when copying over a network connection. Are you doing this on a network?

The simple solution, if you are comfortable with the command line, is to open a "DOS" box (Start --> Run --> and then type "CMD") and use either the Copy or XCopy. You can use the "/S" switch to copy subdirectories (subfolders). This trick is also useful for deleting files that will no longer delete (a problem if you end up with a file name that uses "special" characters).

nolonemo wrote on 8/14/2008, 8:53 AM

You could try downloading the trial of Acronis True Image and backing up that folder, then restoring it to the new PC. Since you should be imaging your HD for backup periodically anyway, you might as well go ahead and buy the full verision.

will-3 wrote on 8/14/2008, 11:01 AM

Thanks everybody.

I found other people who have had this problem. We are running XP Home on the machine in question... with 1GB of RAM.
The files are on a laptop drive plugged into a USB 2.0 port using one of those open cable adapters that connect a bare hard disk to a usb port. (I've used this on many projects and it works fine.)

If anyone has any suggestions on other programs that would be great.

Otherwise I'll try the command line option to see what happens there.

Thanks again.

Chienworks wrote on 8/14/2008, 11:06 AM

Wait a minute .... "The files are on a laptop drive plugged into a USB 2.0 port using one of those open cable adapters" .... am i following this correctly? How about plugging that drive into the new computer instead of the old one?

nolonemo wrote on 8/14/2008, 11:55 AM

I am not certain, but won't xcopy truncate long file names to xxxxxxx~.xxx format? Also truncate long folder names?

Chienworks wrote on 8/14/2008, 12:39 PM

xcopy preserves long filenames. copy doesn't.

Galeng wrote on 8/14/2008, 1:52 PM

Probably the quickest and most effective way (if you've been in a computer before) is just to pop the drive out of your old computer and temporarily attach to new computer, unless you have an issue with pata vs sata connections.

My most recent computer only had sata connections so couldn't install my pata drives from other computer w/o an adapter.

will-3 wrote on 8/14/2008, 2:24 PM

I mis-spoke... the files were backed up to an external hard disk before the laptop crashed.

I don't want to put the externalhard disk in the new system... I want to copy the files to the hard disk in the new system.

So xcopy will copy long file names? and long path names?

Terry Esslinger wrote on 8/14/2008, 2:45 PM

Still, if the files are on the external hard drive, connect it to the new computer, copy the files over and then disconnect t, or am I reading this wrong?
Or if they are not on the external hard drive, copy them to the external hard drive and use the HD like a flash drive.

jabloomf1230 wrote on 8/15/2008, 10:19 AM

Try this freeware (Teracopy):

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

There is also the Microsoft Robocopy command, which is available as a download (Windows Resource Toolkit) for XP and is included in Vista. It also has GUI, so you don't have to run it from a CMD box:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160891.aspx

Teracopy is much better IMO.

DSCalef wrote on 8/15/2008, 4:43 PM

My favorite file copy program is InSync from Dillobits software. http://www.dillobits.com/insync.html

I have used this program for many years to copy entire disks, or just specific directories. It pushes along through errors and creates a log of files it skips and why.

It is designed to Sync two sets of files in both directions. I use it mostly for one-way backups where it copies the latest files to a 2nd location. I use it as one of two backups for my server. The other is standard backup software. The advantage of InSync is on file deletion. If I delete a file, a copy still lives in my backup destination forever. You can run it not only manually, but on a schedule..

I highly recommend you download and run the free trial.

David
www.EventVideoTeam.com

Coursedesign wrote on 8/15/2008, 7:35 PM

I had to do something like this recently, and solved this and another problem in a different way:

First I put the old C: drive in an external enclosure, and tried to do a simple copy from my new Windows workstation. No access to the old "My Documents", it just won't let me open the folder.

I put the hard drive (SATA) inside, same problem.

Finally I put the old C: drive into my Mac Pro and used OS X Finder to open the "My Documents" folder with no problems (OS X reads NTFS just fine). I then dragged this folder to my new C: via a VMWare Fusion virtual partition, still using Finder, and got everything over in a hurry (the writing to the NTFS new C: drive was of course done by VM Fusion).

blink3times wrote on 8/15/2008, 8:25 PM

Can you not make use of wild cards?

example:

Copy *.com will copy all com files

Terje wrote on 8/15/2008, 11:19 PM

Can you not make use of wild cards?

The problem is with long file names in deeply nested directories. Copy won't copy them. Even the Windows file explorer will not copy them. I haven't tried lately, but ZIP also used to not be able to handle this.

Usually the GNU utilities are better at this than Windows. Search for cygwin, install it. Put the <cygwin install>\bin directory in your path. Open a command window, and (assuming your old disk is on O: and you want the files into the C:\Old on your new disk) run the following commands.

C:
cd \Old
cp -r O:/* .

Please note that the cygwin utilities use forward slashes to separate directories, not backward slashes (as it should, it is Windows that has it assways).

cp is the Unix (Cygwin) equivalent of copy/xcopy, and the -r means (as with most Unix commend lines) "recursive', in other words, copy all files and all directories.

If that doesn't work, try the following set of commands
O:
tar zcvf old_files.tar.gz *
copy old_files.tar.gz C:\Old
C:
cd \Old
tar zxvf old_files.tar.gz

I would be quite surprised if the tar method fails. If tar fails I doubt any tool will work.