Copying Drives

[Scarlett]

I have bought an external hard drive and am trying to copy as much of my C drive to it as possible. However I get error messages saying that a user is using the program and it needs to be closed before it can be copied. I have closed all progs on my PC so don't understand what else I can do! I am on the desktop with just my MY COMPUTER C DRIVE open and the new drive open, whilst I transfer one to the other. I have looked at the bottom right to see if there are open progs but all I can see are updates for java and Adobe Reader, and the anti virus thingy. Any ideas?!

[Old_Geezer]

You will be using the operating system on the C: drive which may well be the cause of the issue. You could boot off of a floppy disk or cd or flash drive to get the copy done. Or there are free programmes out there that will continue to copy when it sees and error and copy whatever it can. Not that I can recall names now but a web search should find them.

How accurate a copy do you need ? Operating systems are best reinstalled anyway. Would it be enough to just copy over your "documents" ?

[Scarlett]

Thanks Geezer- I thought as much, so I tried to just copy my documents but I got a similar error message!

[SlackAlice]

All you can really 'copy' are documents/music/photo's/images using the method your using.

You can use Windows to create a System Image and store it on an External Drive and create a Windows Backup.

[Old_Geezer]

That's interesting. Try booting into safe mode and trying again. Assuming you can still see the external drive that is.

[Wak]

The FREE program, EaseUS todo backup Free 4.0 will clone all the C Drive on to the external drive for you.

Google for it.