Hd to Hd data transfer

[Chris P.]

Hello. I'm in the middle of copying a bunch of stuff from
and old Hard Drive to a new one. Aside from Dragging and
Dropping or using Edit>Copy To Folder, I've even used
Xcopy in one or two cases just for fun! All have seemed
to work, somewhat, thus far. I say somewhat because there
are a few things in the new drive that call for
reinstalls. Apparently in some cases some files (.dll's,
et.al.)don't get copied over. I went back to look for
them in the old drive to no avail. In any case, here's
something else that happened with the command line. I
figured I'd use xcopy to move the larger stuff in the
Program Files folder. I started with this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Chris> xcopy D:\Program
Files\Adobe C:\Program Files\Adobe /c/h/e/r/k

and what I got was a no-can-do cuz of 'invalid number of
parameters'. What am I doing wrong? There's gotta be a
better way to do this.
Thanks again,
--chris.

[I'm Dan]

"Chris P." > wrote:
> Hello. I'm in the middle of copying a bunch of stuff
> from and old Hard Drive to a new one. Aside from
> Dragging and Dropping or using Edit>Copy To
> Folder, I've even used Xcopy in one or two cases
> just for fun! All have seemed to work, somewhat,
> thus far. I say somewhat because there are a few
> things in the new drive that call for reinstalls.
> Apparently in some cases some files (.dll's, et.al.)
> don't get copied over. I went back to look for
> them in the old drive to no avail. In any case,
> here's something else that happened with the
> command line. I figured I'd use xcopy to move the
> larger stuff in the Program Files folder. I started
> with this:
>
> C:\Documents and Settings\Chris> xcopy D:\Program
> Files\Adobe C:\Program Files\Adobe /c/h/e/r/k
>
> and what I got was a no-can-do cuz of 'invalid
> number of parameters'. What am I doing wrong?
> There's gotta be a better way to do this.

For an occasional operation, drag-and-drop is your "better way". What
xcopy is good for is working in scripts or batch files to automate
repetitive tasks (for example, a batch file that copies "My Documents"
to a backup location once a day).

As for your particular instance above, if that's what you literally
typed then you're missing the quotes. DOS commands recognize spaces as
separating parameters, so D:\Program is one parameter, Files\Adobe is
another, etc. When you use long filenames on the command line, you need
to enclose them in quotes if they have embedded spaces so they are
parsed as one parameter -- xcopy "D:\Program Files\Adobe" "C:\Program
Files\Adobe" /c/h/e/r/k. Note you don't need quotes if there are no
spaces (e.g., d:\progra~1\windowsupdate wouldn't need quotes).