This is a good point.  XCOPY may cause problems by changing the short
names of folders.

Another point is that simply copying files from your D drive to C may
result in programs on the D drive failing to work afterwards becaused
shortcuts, registry entries and other parameters will not have been
updated to know that the files are no longer on the D drive.  If you are
intending to copy all the files from your current D drive to your C,
replacing the D drive with a larger drive and then copying all the files
that were on the original D back to the new D, then the above objection
is eliminated.

However, there are safer ways.  Many retail hard drives, such as Western
Digital and Maxtor contain software to copy entire partitions from one
drive to another.  Since it is a disk-to-disk copy with no reference to
the contents of the disk, there are no problems with renaming folders or
files.

----- Original Message -----
From: James Leo Woodford, Jr. <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: [PCSOFT] Hard drives


> There has been much discussion on this list regarding
> the use of XCOPY for copying an entire hard drive to
> another and, without causing another debate, I must
> say that as a PC professional I have seen the light.
> XCOPY is NOT a good option. I would like to point you
> to XXCOPY with is an enhanced, freeware version of
> XCOPY that, behind the scene does a much better job
> and ensure the integrity of the data on the drive.
> Good luck. Here's the link:
>
> http://www.datman.com/xxcopy/
>
> --- Gunnar Bagge via wanadoo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > At 13:48 08-08-00 -0400, Rosanne wrote:
> > >My main hard drive is, of course, "C".  I have a
> > much smaller drive, "D".  I
> > >want to put in a new fast drive in place of "D".
> > Can I copy the whole "D"
> > >drive onto "C", using dos commands?
> >
> >
> >  From a Windows DOS session do the following
> > command:
> >
> >         XCOPY SOURCE_DRIVE_PATH\*.*
> > DESTINATION_DRIVE_PATH\*.* /R/I/C/H/K/E/Y
> >
> > In your case this would be:
> >
> >         XCOPY D:\*.* C:\*.* /R/I/C/H/K/E/Y
> >
> > This will copy everything, including system files
> > and empty directories, and any existing files will
> > be overwritten without asking. If you're planning on
> > moving everything back later you should make a new
> > directory - say old_d - on your c-drive and replace
> > the C:\*.* with C:\old_d\*.* in the command above.
> > This will keep everything together and you won't
> > overwrite anything.

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