not able to drag & drop hard drive contents

I have an external hard drive F with about 100 GB of data on it. I'm wanting to back it up to a 128 GB flash drive E by dragging and dropping F to E. When I try to drag and drop (both from F in My Computer and from the address bar of F as an opened folder) instead of copying the contents of F to E, I get a mere shortcut to F.

I also tried using Copy to Folder and Copy and Paste to accomplish this, and with both it seemed to be copying a short time only to give me an error message that it cannot copy file or folder.

There are many folders and freestanding files on F, so dragging and dropping all the items individually would be a pretty big task.

By the way, I'm working towards moving to a Windows 7 computer. Don't think I'm lingering at XP forever.




Computer: Dell System B3 Desktop
CPU: Intel Pentium 4-2667 (Northwood, D1)
2666 MHz (20.00x133.3) @ 2657 MHz (20.00x132.9)
Motherboard: DELL 0G1548
Chipset: Intel 845GEV (Brookdale-GEV) + ICH4
Memory: 2048 MBytes @ 166 MHz, 2.5-3-3-7
- 1024 MB PC3200 DDR-SDRAM - Kingston K
Graphics: Intel 82845G/GL/GV Graphics Controller [DELL]
Intel i845G(L) Integrated, 64 MB
Drive: ST380011A, 78.1 GB, E-IDE (ATA-6)
Drive: HGST HTS545050A7E380, 488.4 GB, Serial ATA 3Gb/s <-> USB
Drive: SAMSUNG CD-R/RW SW-252S, CD-R Writer
Sound: Creative Technology SB Live! Series Audio Processor
Network: RealTek Semiconductor RTL8139 PCI Fast Ethernet NIC [A/B/C]
Network: Broadcom 4401 10/100 Integrated Controller
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Build 2600 SP3

 

Is the flash drive FAT32? FAT32 has a max file size of 4GB so if any of the files being copied exceed that limit you will get an error.

 

Yea, it's FAT32. I have folders (not files) bigger than 4 GB. So those can't be copied onto my flash drive?

 

It's a file size limit so folders should be OK. I suspect though that the presence of just one file over 4GB might halt the copy process. Not sure though. You could check for large files with Treesize.

 

I'm re-checking with WiseCare's Big Files Manager.

 

According to it all files are under 1 GB.

 

I'm trying to do the transfer with the program Unstoppable Copier. Very slow, but so far, so good.

 

You could use the XCOPY command from a command prompt:

Code:

xcopy F: E: /v /k /o