Copying problem

[highlandh]

I've encountered a very frustrating problem when I simply attempt to copy a folder or any of its files from the hard drive to any removable media or external drive. THERE IS NO PROBLEM IN COPYING OTHER FILES OR FOLDERS ON MY HARD DRIVE TO ANY OF THE OTHER FORMS OF REMOVABLE/EXTERNAL MEDIA, ONLY THIS ONE PARTICULAR FOLDER. And yet I have never had problems with copying this folder in the past. I'm simply backing up this folder and its associated files -- that's all I'm doing. And I have done this countless times in the past.

Now, however, I receive an error message whenever I attempt to do this: "Cannot Copy File". That is the totality of the error message.

Again, I have never encountered this particular error message while using Windows XP Professional. Never.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I might be able to overcome this problem? I'm a masters degree candidate in political science at Virginia Tech (I'm located off campus, however, so I do not have ready access to the computer science department, for instance) and the files that I'm trying to back up are my masters thesis. (Very important!) Right now I'm unable to make any backups of my thesis and this whole situation is getting a little hairy...

Thanks!

Kevin

[RJ]

Hello and welcome to PC Mech,

have you done a virus scan ?
Also the hard drive could have developed bad sectors. I'd download the diagnostic tool from the manufacturer's website and let it check the drive.

How old is the hard drive, btw ?

RJ

[glc]

Can you copy it to a different folder on your hard drive?

[highlandh]

I have performed a virus scan. No viruses. This hard drive is an IBM hard drive (60GB); it's on a Dell Inspiron 8200 system (about two years old).

I haven't run any of the diagnostics, but I will. Thanks for the suggestion!

[highlandh]

I tried copying this folder to another portion of my hard drive -- no dice. It doesn't work. Same error message. Any further suggestions? Thanks!

[RJ]

To me it sounds like defective sectors. IBM hard drives haven't been of good quality for the last couple of years. I myself had IBM hard drives, and after about 2 - 2.5 years they went south. One of them developed defective sectors, so that I couldn't copy a video file off it, so I had to capture it again.

IBM is no more in hard drive business, it was taken over by Hitachi. Therefore you will find the diagnostic tool on the Hitachi site.
Go here, the tool is called DriveFitnessTest. Just download the CD image, burn it to a CD and boot from it.
Alternatively, if you have a floppy drive, you can also download the diskette creator and let it create a floppy, then boot from it.

RJ

[highlandh]

I found out -- by accident -- that by simply changing the name of the folder itself solve the problem. (After performing checks on the quality of all of the sectors on my hard drive I found that there were no problems.) I'm not exactly sure why simply changing the name of the folder/file solved the problem, but it's definitely strange. Something that I have never encountered before.

Thanks to everyone for their help!

Kevin

[glc]

The folder/file name may have had some invalid characters.