Q: I want to copy all the files from a 5.25-inch floppy disk on to a 3.5-inch floppy disk, including the ones in some sub-directories. The COPY command won’t copy the contents of sub-directories, but when I try to use DISKCOPY I get the error message “incompatible format for drive’. What’s going wrong?
A: There are three commands to copy files from one disk to another: COPY, XCOPY and DISKCOPY. They work in different ways, and for any copy operation you need to choose the tool that’s most appropriate for what you want to do.
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The problem with COPY is that it only works on the directory you specify and it cannot create new directories on the new disk. XCOPY works in a similar way to COPY but is more intelligent. You can tell it to look inside sub-directories, and it will automatically create those sub-directories on the new disk.
The command you need to type in, assuming you are copying from drive A to drive B, is:
XCOPY A:*.* B: /S
Is is the /S switch that tells XCOPY to work on subdirectories too.
Who remembers using a copy command which didn’t work with subdirectories?
Well of course we all use ROBOCOPY these days, right?
Anyway, I would use COPY over XCOPY if I didn’t need any of the XCOPY options, because COPY is built into the command interpreter and XCOPY is a separate executable (or in the case of Windows 9x, two executables).
> Who remembers using a copy command which didn’t work with subdirectories?
By default?
$ mkdir foo
$ cp foo bar
cp: omitting directory ‘foo’
$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/cp
coreutils-8.22-19.fc21.x86_64
I remember using COPY before discovering XCOPY and having to swap disks (Amstrad 1640 SD for those that remember) for Every. Single. File. That took a long time for both disks for Microprose F19
Surely you want XCOPY /S /E…
The difference between COPY and XCOPY is that COPY was a command builtin to the shell (COMMAND.COM) and XCOPY was an external utility that lived wherever you put the standard DOS utilities (often C:\DOS).
(back to lurking now)
I’d forgotten about that, a third disk required for the process!
/E implies /S
I remember operating systems that didn’t HAVE any stinkin’ subdirectories to copy from.