Need a little computer help!

[UTAHCRUISER]

Hi there,
I have an older laptop that is starting to behave very poorly, and has alot of pictures on it and many (most) are not backed up. So, I decided to try to copy all these pics onto an external drive, and then I plan on reformatting the drive on the computer. The computer is running Windows XP.

As I have been copying the folders onto the external drive, nearly every one will copy about half way and then the computer will spit out an error message saying that it can't copy a certain picture in that folder due to a cyclical redundancy error. I can open the folder and copy all the rest of the pictures individually, but this is proving to take a realllllly long time.

I was wondering if any of you know if there is a way to get the computer to ignore the corrupt pictures, or maybe just detect and delete the corrupt pics, or something... At the rate I am going, I will be an old man before I complete this process.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks!
Chad

 

[Caleb]

my suggestion would be to pull the hard drive and stick it into an external carrier (you can usually pick a carrier up for the laptop derives for fairly cheap), then you should just be able to copy all the contents and sort it on your other machine. You also may be able to do it on the command line, I know on a *nix machine you could no problem, but I don't know the DOS command line very well. How mauch info is it? If you want to bring me the drive I could prolly do it for you. (I'd have to find my carrier but thats not really a problem).

 

[mbryson]

I'd run defrag and see if that helps if you haven't.

 

[Caleb]

I'd run defrag and see if that helps if you haven't.

good idea, defrag and scan disk (man it's been a while since I have done much with windows )

 

[UTAHCRUISER]

Thanks for the reply! I think I have an external carrier floating around someplace. So when copying from one drive to another, I should not run into that cyclical redundancy error?
I only have about 5 GB of pictures on the drive, but most were taken with a 3MP camera, so there are TONS of individual pictures to sort thru.

Chad

my suggestion would be to pull the hard drive and stick it into an external carrier (you can usually pick a carrier up for the laptop derives for fairly cheap), then you should just be able to copy all the contents and sort it on your other machine. You also may be able to do it on the command line, I know on a *nix machine you could no problem, but I don't know the DOS command line very well. How mauch info is it? If you want to bring me the drive I could prolly do it for you. (I'd have to find my carrier but thats not really a problem).

 

[UTAHCRUISER]

The defrag utility quit working on the computer a few months ago. Every time I try to run it, I get an error message that states that microsoft management console has encountered a problem and needs to close, and then the machine will freeze up for about 5 minutes. Like I said- the machine is starting to run really poorly... I even tried installing a different defrag utility on the machine, but it generated the same error.

From the reading I've done on the symptoms the computer has, it appears that perhaps the hard drive has some physical damage and the corrupt data is a result of it residing in a bad sector of the drive.

Thanks!
CHad

I'd run defrag and see if that helps if you haven't.

 

[mbryson]

The defrag utility quit working on the computer a few months ago. Every time I try to run it, I get an error message that states that microsoft management console has encountered a problem and needs to close, and then the machine will freeze up for about 5 minutes. Like I said- the machine is starting to run really poorly... I even tried installing a different defrag utility on the machine, but it generated the same error.

From the reading I've done on the symptoms the computer has, it appears that perhaps the hard drive has some physical damage and the corrupt data is a result of it residing in a bad sector of the drive.

Thanks!
CHad

Wow, if you've got errors like that, good luck getting whatever you can. I might try copying to a different (new) folder on the C: drive somewhere and then copy from the new location.

 

[UTAHCRUISER]

Hmmm. That sounds like a good idea. I'll have to give that a shot. If I could get the data to a clean place on the C: drive, then perhaps copying would be easier.

Thanks,
Chad

Wow, if you've got errors like that, good luck getting whatever you can. I might try copying to a different (new) folder on the C: drive somewhere and then copy from the new location.

 

[78mitsu]

DO NOT DEFRAG IT. If you do, you risk damaging more data. You're going to lose some of the pictures, but here is the best way to recover what you can.

Plug in the attached drive it will be assigned say (x go start->run type cmd<enter> when you get the black window then:
cd <root path of all the pictures>it will probabbly be something like c:\documents and settings\yourname\my documents\my pictures\
then xcopy *.* x:\pictures\ /c /e /v /d /f /h >> x:\pictures\logfile.txt
this will copy all the files it can and generate error messages in the logfile to tell you which ones it can't

 

[UTAHCRUISER]

Sweet! This sounds like the ticket. I appologize for my lack of technical savy, but I just want to clarify before I try this: You wrote to enter the following-
cd <root path of all the pictures>it will probabbly be something like c:\documents and settings\yourname\my documents\my pictures\
then xcopy *.* x:\pictures\ /c /e /v /d /f /h >> x:\pictures\logfile.txt

so, I would enter this? (substituting the actual path and drive letter)

cd <documents and settings\Hp_Owner\My Documents\My Pictures>xcopy *.* J:\pictures\ /c /e /v /d /f /h >> J:\pictures\logfile.txt

Is that correct? I have close to no experience working with commands, so I just want to be sure that is correct! Also, do the caps and spaces matter?

Thanks again for your help! It really sucks to realize possibly too late that I slacked too long on backing up important stuff!

Chad

DO NOT DEFRAG IT. If you do, you risk damaging more data. You're going to lose some of the pictures, but here is the best way to recover what you can.

Plug in the attached drive it will be assigned say (x go start->run type cmd<enter> when you get the black window then:
cd <root path of all the pictures>it will probabbly be something like c:\documents and settings\yourname\my documents\my pictures\
then xcopy *.* x:\pictures\ /c /e /v /d /f /h >> x:\pictures\logfile.txt
this will copy all the files it can and generate error messages in the logfile to tell you which ones it can't

 

[78mitsu]

you actually have to issue two commands, the first one is the CD (change directory) the second is the copy from that directory. or you could paste this into your command line and substitute the actual drive looks like J? it'll do the same thing.

xcopy "c:\documents and settings\Hp_Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\*.*" "J:\pictures\" /c /e /v /d /f /h >> J:\pictures\logfile.txt

the caps are irrelevent, but the spaces are important, they define the argument boundries.