Copying C drive makes destination folder invisible

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ronny
  • Start date Start date
R

Ronny

To do a quick backup of the current state of the C: drive, I did a

mkdir d:\copy_s
XCOPY C:\ D:\copy_c /s

To my surprise, two things happened:

- After copying tons of files, I get the message "sharing violation"
after XCOPY
printed the filename c:\windows\system32\config\default

- Although I can CD in a command shell to d:\copy_c, that directory
was not visible
in the Windows Explorer wenn doing a

dir d:\

Only after I enabled "show system files" for the browser, the
directory was visible.

Questions:

Why did I get a sharing violation?

Why is the directory which I created, treated as a "system" file?

BTW, doing a

attrib d:\copy_c

shows the attributes

A SH

which, I guess, mean "archived" and "shared"....

Ronald
 
Ronny said:
To do a quick backup of the current state of the C: drive, I did a

mkdir d:\copy_s
XCOPY C:\ D:\copy_c /s

To my surprise, two things happened:

- After copying tons of files, I get the message "sharing violation"
after XCOPY
printed the filename c:\windows\system32\config\default

- Although I can CD in a command shell to d:\copy_c, that directory
was not visible
in the Windows Explorer wenn doing a

dir d:\

Only after I enabled "show system files" for the browser, the
directory was visible.

Questions:

Why did I get a sharing violation?

Why is the directory which I created, treated as a "system" file?

BTW, doing a

attrib d:\copy_c

shows the attributes

A SH

which, I guess, mean "archived" and "shared"....

Ronald
Click to expand...


XCOPY isn't a useful tool if you're trying to back up your C drive. It won't
copy files that are in use. That's why you received the 'sharing violation'
notice. The file it stopped at is one of the files that make up the Windows
registry.

If you enter XCOPY /? in a command prompt window you'll see that you can use the
/C switch to continue copying files when events such as the 'sharing violation'
occur.

I'm not sure why the D:\copy_c folder ended up becoming a system folder. What I
will pass along is that if you enter ATTRIB /? in a command prompt window you'll
find that A SH means Archived, System, and Hidden.

On a side note: If D is a second partition on your primary hard drive then you
really haven't backed up anything. A backup should reside on a seperate hard
drive preferably an external one.

Good luck

Nepatsfan
 
If you enter XCOPY /? in a command prompt window you'll see that you can use the
/C switch to continue copying files when events such as the 'sharing violation'
occur.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I overlooked this!
I'm not sure why the D:\copy_c folder ended up becoming a system folder.
Click to expand...

This is really bizarre....
On a side note: If D is a second partition on your primary hard drive then you
really haven't backed up anything. A backup should reside on a seperate hard
drive preferably an external one.
Click to expand...

I know. The reason for this was that I wanted to backup C: to CDROM,
but the way I'm used to do it (using Windows Explorer, dragging the
files to a Explorer window showing the (yet empty) CDROM drive)
does not work for backing up C: (it is rejected by Explorer,
presumably
because it needs to put the files first into a temporary folder on the
C: drive). So that's why I first wanted to copy them to the D: drive
and from there to CDROM.

Ronald
 
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