Well, I tried copying a whole hard drive and pasting it to another using MS Win98 Explorer. All was fine for a while. Then I got a popup window with the error message

Cannot copy (filename here): The file exists.


So I clicked OK, and it had aborted the whole pasting job. Please post replies if you have seen this. What's a good way to copy a windows partition from one hard drive to another? It needn't be an exact copy for this particular job - just files will do.

sounds like it tried to copy the entire hard drive onto itself. are you sure you got the destination right?

also.. where are you copying to, and are you sure you have enough space? what kind of network are you on? if you could explain a bit more, it would help... i'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.

Well, let me try to be more clear. I should post better.

I have a computer I use for disk drive copying between many different hard drives with various operating systems. My needs change for each situation. Sometimes I use Finnix and sometimes I use Windows.

I highlighted all the folders and files in the root directory of one hard drive using MS Explorer. I clicked Copy. Then I clicked in the root directory of another drive and selected paste from the menu.

The error message did indeed say the file exists. You would think it would say the file does not exist.

I eventually solved my problem. The offending file has the exact same size as another one in the same directory. One has a shortened name with a ~1 at the end. The other has the same name except that it is not shortened. I wonder how this happened? Well, I am guessing that Windows got confused. When I copy each file separately it works fine for some reason.

Now I have to figure out why I have two of the same file!

I checked both drives after I got everything copied over. Windows reports each has the same number of files.

Is it OK to post Windows stuff like this here? I am a newbie user, so if I am doing something wrong, then somebody please tell me.

Goodbye for now,
a resu xunil

it's ok to post a few windows questions here and there, but this is by and large a linux forum. ( thus the name, linuxquestions...) anyway, setting up various o/s's like finnix to work with windows is a legit linux question. so... all's ok as far as i see.

anyway... i use an old windows explorer on my win95 at work... and it doesn't support long filenames. i can't remember if it was fat16 or fat32 which first supported long filenames... but explorer, even up to 98, would often get the long filenames confused... which is what probably happened with your system. you might have a few truncated flename on the copied system. some of the long names might not have been preserved. you might want to check on that.

I once had a problem where none of the 9x series would copy a specific file. Basically, Windows 95 (osr2) allowed me to rename a file and give it a stupidly long filename (~150-200 chars), which it thereafter refused to acknowledge as a real file. I couldn't rename it, I couldn't delete it, I couldn't copy or move it, or anything without having to drop down into a proper dos session (this was before I discovered Linux, BTW) and doing it manually with only the old 8:3 filename format. Oddly enough, though, I could open the file (it was a PDF document (something to do with the human genome project) from the US Gov. DOE site - quite interesting reading actually, for me anyway ).

Weird.

Not a problem anymore as I don't really do much genetics in my degree now.