Vista Tutorial - Copying Files to External Drive

Folks,

I'm running Vista32 on my laptop computer. I have a 1TB Western Digital external drive. I recently copied about 55gigs of music onto the computer, and I'm moving it to the external drive for my third backup so far. (I backup often in case of a hard drive crash).

Other times, I've had no problems. This is what happened this time:
I copy all files, open the external drive, create a folder titled MyMusic7309, and open it. I hit ctrl V to copy all files. Of the 233 folders, only about 32 copy. There is no error message. The system runs Copying Files with a count of how much time remains and how many total files there are (about 13 thousand), then just stops after copying 32 folders.

Perplexed, I try again, to the same location. I'm prepared to hit "skip" to the ones that I've already copied, but the same thing happens after copying about 20 more folders over.

Ok, so this is getting annoying. I try going to Organize->Select All. Then I go to the ExDrive and go to Organize->Paste. This time it fill is with about 8 more folders, bringing the total to 60. As many more times as I do it - any way I can think of - it will now only copy 60 of the folders.

I have done the following:
Virus scans on the drive and the computer
Clicked properties to make sure settings gave me permissions
Removed any read-only or hidden properties from the files I'm transfering.

Also note:
I can copy document files just fine.
I can copy 1 music file at a time over to the drive, but no more, or it won't go above 60.
I have over 800gigs available on the external drive.


Any ideas on how I can get mass copying to work again?

Jhev

My guess would be that your external disk is formatted in Fat32 (maximum of 4GB chunks). If that is true, you should reformat it into NTFS or copy smaller chuncks of files individually.