Copying in DOS

Here you are :::

<A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/xcopyhlp.htm" target="_new">XCopy </A>

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>

You can not make a bootable copy of a drive unless you use a disk image program like Norton Ghost.

:smile: <font color=green>I wonder...what is the speed of gravity!<font color=green> :smile:

Why is that?

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>

I don't know the technical reason. My quess is that when you install windows some program elements are written to a fixed sector on the HDD, but when you make a copy using the copy command it dosen't copy to the same sector on the destination drive.

Maybe someone with more experience has the answer.

:smile: <font color=green>I wonder...what is the speed of gravity!<font color=green> :smile:

DOS commands on files are not good for modern OS.
You can do some simple exercises on long-name files and see what happens.
Even if you did SYS after XCOPY, I'm sure you'd discover later some errors related DOS's long-name and environment limitations.
Yah, GHOST is the perfect solution. Even GOST for Win9X works fine for me on NTFS. But don't forget to do the image first.

Couldn't you get away with a "format /s"?

This would create the first sector as bootable.
Then xcopy would transfer the files.

Or is that too easy to be true?

<b>
If the best things in life are free, why do I keep upgrading my system? :smile:
</b>

You may be right and you could boot with the drive...but what I meant to say was that if you copied Windows to another drive it would not work unless it was copied using an image program.

You can download a trial version of a disk image program called Drive2Drive. It might be considered better than Norton Ghost in that you can make an image copy of a drive while running Windows. <A HREF="http://www.fssdev.com/products/drive2drive/" target="_new">http://www.fssdev.com/products/drive2drive/</A>
I have tried it and it does work.


:smile: <font color=green>I wonder...what is the speed of gravity!<font color=green> :smile:

Windows maintains some fixed addresses not for only boot system files. I’m still in doubt about XCOPYing the system.
As P.Norton noted [<i>Maximazing Windows 98 Administration. SAMS, ISBN 0-672-31218-2, p. 44</i>], "...however, there’s a limitation... even for Ghost with Win98 on an identical machine.... After the Ghost clone installation is completed, Win98, on its first boot inevitably finds some new device to find. The cloned installation will only rarely avoid this problem."

Untill now I used GHOST. Probably Drive2Drive™ 2.0 is better. But not XCOPY.

Thank you, Spdy_Gonzales, for the interesting link.
Hope I'll try the Drive2Drive™ 2.0 on NTFS soon.

I just realised that if you did a straight copy, all the files and registry settings would point to C: or subsequent drive letters.

Copying to drive D: would 'throw' all these settings off.

<b>
Change the sig of the week!
</b>

well that's kinda what you would want if you were backing up a main hard drive. But besides that you can't use XCOPY from DOS to image a Windows system because of the long filenames. You can use XCOPY32 c:*.* d:*.* [param] from a dos box within Windows (this is important as you can't run 32bit xcopy in DOS). I've done it more times than I can count with parameters /s/c/h/e/r/k, which has not given me problems of any kind. <A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q128/7/56.asp" target="_new">XCOPY Commands</A>

I've done it with both Win9X and Win2k (you don't have to type xcopy32 just type xcopy in Win2k) with no problems moving the copied drive as the main drive aftering making sure it's primary partition was active. I've used GHOST as well, but usually I do that if I'm going to install the same image on multiple machines. Other reasons I like third party software, but I still use the above from time to time.

***check the jumpers 1st then check em again***

The quickest way is to use ghost. XCCOPY will not copy hidden or system files. But if now follow the following steps.

1. Make a bootable floppy disk and copy the SYS command to the disk.
2. boot up windows and disable virual memory (windows will reboot and run slow as hell).
3. on reboot go into explorer and copy the contents from one hdd to the other.
4. swap the drives over and set the new drive as master.
5. boot from the boot disk and sys the new harddrive.
6. reboot into windows and re enable the virtual memory.

Only the insane prosper.
Only those who prosper can judge what is sane.

Thanks for all the help everyone.
I have not had a chance to do it yet.
This forum has such a wealth of knowledge behind, it is appreciated.

INTELigence is gained by obtaining aMD

Use xcopy.
Use the syntax as "chord" wrote (you could omit /s since /e does the same.
The /h makes sure that also hidden files is copied.
/k is good since the attributes are kept.

One really good thing with xcopy is that it can copy files that have illegal file names.
Win98se is rather strict about that and mp3's with % or ´` ^ and similar characters are not easy to copy with Explorer but works great to copy with xcopy.exe.