HD to HD Data Transfer

[Chris P]

Greetings!
I've just recently installed a new Hard Drive and am
using my old one as a secondary(slave). I believe I have
all (or at least most of) my ducks in a row in terms of
reaching a final goal which is (in part) -> moving all my
old stuff(not old OS stuff)to the new drive and
reformating the old one. I ran an xcopy from the command
prompt in an attempt to move a folder over and it
apparently copied, D: to C: (old to new), I just don't
know where to find it. I can't find it anywhere on the
drive I thought I copied them to(C:). The command line I
used is: > xcopy D:\Dell C: /c/h/e/r/k , trying to copy
the folder 'Dell' from D: to C:. I could't find it
anywhere on C:(also looked for individual files and
folders in 'Dell', on the new drive). You know, it just
occured to me...could the reason for this not working be
that I ran the xcopy D: to C:, from C:?
Oh yeah, and in a frustration whim I decided to open up
two windows explorer windows and drag and drop the folder
from one drive to the next. This, quicker than you can
type a command line, worked.
So I'm at kind of a loss as to how to continue, or as to
which is gonna be the BEST WAY to continue. What in the
world happened to the 'Dell' folder in the xcopy? Command
Prompt said it copied. Where? Any help would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks Much. --chris.

[Randy Byrne [MVP]]

Oh my, DOS commands... If I remember my DOS commands right, you dropped the files
where ever the C path was at the time. I believe that the command needed a little
tweak.

xcopy D:\Dell C:\ /c/h/e/r/k

Notice the \ after C:

Using the classic search from Explorer
1. Right click on you C drive and select search
2. Type DELL in the "Search for files and folders" field
3. check the Advanced Options and make sure that the top 3 are checked.
4. Click the Search Now button.

Good luck.

--

Randy Byrne
Microsoft MVP (Windows Technologies)
http://support.microsoft.com/support/mvp
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Do not email me, please use the newsgroup so that everyone benefits.


"Chris P" > wrote in message
...
> Greetings!
> I've just recently installed a new Hard Drive and am
> using my old one as a secondary(slave). I believe I have
> all (or at least most of) my ducks in a row in terms of
> reaching a final goal which is (in part) -> moving all my
> old stuff(not old OS stuff)to the new drive and
> reformating the old one. I ran an xcopy from the command
> prompt in an attempt to move a folder over and it
> apparently copied, D: to C: (old to new), I just don't
> know where to find it. I can't find it anywhere on the
> drive I thought I copied them to(C:). The command line I
> used is: > xcopy D:\Dell C: /c/h/e/r/k , trying to copy
> the folder 'Dell' from D: to C:. I could't find it
> anywhere on C:(also looked for individual files and
> folders in 'Dell', on the new drive). You know, it just
> occured to me...could the reason for this not working be
> that I ran the xcopy D: to C:, from C:?
> Oh yeah, and in a frustration whim I decided to open up
> two windows explorer windows and drag and drop the folder
> from one drive to the next. This, quicker than you can
> type a command line, worked.
> So I'm at kind of a loss as to how to continue, or as to
> which is gonna be the BEST WAY to continue. What in the
> world happened to the 'Dell' folder in the xcopy? Command
> Prompt said it copied. Where? Any help would be greatly
> appreciated. Thanks Much. --chris.

[I'm Dan]

"Chris P" > wrote:
> I ran an xcopy from the command
> prompt in an attempt to move a folder over and it
> apparently copied, D: to C: (old to new), I just don't
> know where to find it. I can't find it anywhere on the
> drive I thought I copied them to(C:). The command line I
> used is: > xcopy D:\Dell C: /c/h/e/r/k , trying to copy
> the folder 'Dell' from D: to C:. I could't find it
> anywhere on C:(also looked for individual files and
> folders in 'Dell', on the new drive). You know, it just
> occured to me...could the reason for this not working be
> that I ran the xcopy D: to C:, from C:?

Since you specified the source and destination drives, it doesn't matter
which drive you were running the command from. The key, however, is in
the command syntax you used ("xcopy D:\Dell C:"). "D:\Dell" means all
the *files* in the Dell directory, but not the directory itself. "C:"
(with no backslash) means whatever the current directory was on the C:
drive. When you first open up a command window, you're probably at
"C:\Documents and Settings\Chris" or something similar. Since you
specified only a target drive but not a target directory, xcopy will
copy all the source files into this directory. Don't look for a "Dell"
folder in "C:\Documents and Settings\Chris", look for the individual
files.

FWIW, the commands you probably wanted (ignoring all the command
switches for the moment) would have been:

md C:\Dell
xcopy D:\Dell C:\Dell