I plugged in my old IDE hard drives from my old machine and wanted to copy all the data across to my 2TB drive. Dragging and dropping left me with errors of corrupt files and so my command line trick is to use XCOPY.
So you would normally navigate into the directory you wish to copy from cmd and type: “xcopy *.* “D:\destination\” /s /e /c”
Now I’m not too sure why I use the s in the parameters and possibly you could do without it, but what it does is copy all the data from the directory you navigated into to the destination directory, including subfolders and files (hence ALL) but it continues if it hits and error (for example a corrupt file and therefore is unable to normally copy the file). In the case, the file is still not copied, but at least you can the look back at the history and check out which file and try to salvage the file.
The problem I just had was I received an “Insufficient Memory” error, which is related to the filename (including drive letters and folders – pwd if you may will give you this in unix) is more than 254 characters. To get around this – either find the file and change its name – but this may not solve it completely since there might be more files – in which case, install xxcopy. This program works just the same as xcopy and has no limitation to the length of the names.
Written by Milton Lai