Ok, I've tried this twice now, last week and again just now, and the
results were the same each time. Using xcopy (with the usual 'richkey'
switches) within a Win98 DOS Window, __every__ file is copied from C: to
the destination drive, except for the swap file. I currently have twelve
open apps on my task bar, and about a dozen small utilities running that
have icons in the system tray. Obviously, open files get copied just
fine.
What I suspect is that files that are opened for 'read' get copied fine,
while files that are open for 'write' are probably locked and cannot be
copied. If that's a correct assumption, simply shutting down any open
apps that might write to a file should be sufficient. This is as easy as
it sounds, since like I said above, I have roughly 2 dozen apps running
at this time and apparently only the swap file was locked.
Can someone else give this a try and tell us what happens? I've included
my DOS command(s) below, just so we're clear on what I did to achieve
this success. Note that I sent the output of the xcopy command to a file
called xcopytest.txt so that I could inspect it for error messages, but
that I've copied the status messages back here from that file:
C:\>xcopy c:\*.* e:\c-test /r/i/c/h/k/e/y > e:\xcopytest.txt
Error copying file c:\WIN386.SWP to e:\c-test\WIN386.SWP
The process cannot access the file because it is being used
by another process.
<...snip file list...>
4208 File(s) copied
Jeff Delzer
Jim Meagher wrote:
>
> In a word, no.
>
> You will only get long file names if you execute from within a DOS window.
> But because you are still within the Windows environment, there are lots
> of files open and/or uncopy-able (?).
>
> Jim Meagher
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Perry <[log in to unmask]>
>
> >Jim, does that mean that XCOPY, under the Dos environment, will make a
> >perfect copy of the Hard drive?
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