Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Moggy Cattermole]

Somewhere along the lines I upset my computer and it's now corrupted. One of the sys32 windows drivers is buggered and it won't boot. Windows repair won't work, neither will repairing it from the cd. System restore etc is also broken. Command prompt appears to work though.

My question, I have an external hard drive that registers as f:\ on my computer. I would dearly love it to copy across my games install folder, c:\Games and Stuff with all its many wonders to my external. Have attempted command prompting this based on tutorials, but no such luck. What should I type to in theory move games and stuff folder to the f:\ drive or a folder on that? eg f:\save which is ideally where it would go.

At the moment command prompt doesn't seem to recognize c:\Games and Stuff, perhaps the syntax is wrong or something?

Also if I re-install windows, will it insist on wiping everything on my c:\ drive?

I don't have the necessary space to reinstall it at the moment anyway, 13gb out of a recommended 19.2gb. Is there a command prompt way of deleting something or, bearing in mind that i'm reinstalling windows 7 anyway, will that not really matter? I haven't really pushed on with the re-install windows thing yet in case I break something else or lose data.

Gents, I'd really appreciate any and all advice I would dearly love to save the Games and Stuff Folder (and documents etc) as I've invested a lot of time in some of the games and programs I have customising and altering them . Anyone who has a heavily modded IL2 will understand,then duplicate it for other games too.. Urrgh, very annoying, hopefully with your help I'll be able to save it!

Cheers gents,
Mog

[WhoDatNotSayin]

Regarding the command line, I'm not quite sure about this, but it may be that you are getting a problem because the path has spaces in it you may need to use something like copy "c:\Games and Stuff" "f:\save" (if I've got the syntax right.

If all else fails, and you've got access to another computer you could either (a) take your C drive out and install it temporarily in the other PC to copy stuff to it, and then copy to the F drive from there, or (b) Make yourself a Ubuntu Live CD on it, and then run this on your PC (DON'T install Ubuntu when it asks if you want to - this would wipe everything on the C drive). Though it is a little slow when running from a CD, Ubuntu will allow you to copy files etc, even with no working OS on a PC - useful to have as a backup. It is possible to make a bootable USB stick version too, though I've never tried it.

Info on making a Ubuntu Live CD here: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
See also the Wikipedia article on Ubuntu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29

[Moggy Cattermole]

I've tried the command prompt - it states
C:\Games and Stuff*
The system cannot find the file specified

A bit worrying.. Would remove the harddrive, but it's a laptop so I'm working with the family desktop at the moment. Will try the ubuntu link, thanks so much for the help.

[jt189]

whodatnotsayin is right on the money and yes the bootable usb stick drive will work.
But now if all else fails I recommend trying to see if a interface with a 240 jhp will fix it. Cheers 

[Moggy Cattermole]

I'm sorry, but I've no idea how to set up an interface with a 240 jhp. To be honest, I'm not sure what it is, or how to set it up, though I appreciate the suggestion.

[Garethster]

First off. See if you can change your current directory from c:\ to c:\Games and Stuff, the command is as follows:

cd c:\Games and Stuff

then hit Enter

Let us know if you can get that far.

[WhoDatNotSayin]

Yes, laptops can be awkward. If you don't have any luck with the command prompt, the Ubuntu route is probably the way to go - again take care with what you are doing, don't install Ubuntu, just run it from the disk, and think about what you are doing when you start copying stuff.

Ubuntu is a little different than windows, but you'll soon see how it works.

[Moggy Cattermole]

typed in Garethster's code. It responded:

X:\windows\widows32>

...which was what it was displaying before when i opened the command prompt.

Still downloading the ubuntu file,w ill try to burn it to a cd / copy it over when it's done.

[Radoye]

First off. See if you can change your current directory from c:\ to c:\Games and Stuff, the command is as follows:

cd c:\Games and Stuff

then hit Enter

Let us know if you can get that far.

Yeah, that's the first step.

Also, you could try to do a dir/p from your c root folder just to see if long folder names are recognized at all or not.

If you see "Games and Stuff" listed among the folders after the dir command it's OK, if not - you'll most likely find it as "Games~1" or something along those lines.

If that's the case you'll need to use this short name when typing commands.

[Radoye]

typed in Garethster's code. It responded:

X:\windows\widows32>

...which was what it was displaying before when i opened the command prompt.

Still downloading the ubuntu file,w ill try to burn it to a cd / copy it over when it's done.

OK so you're on the X:\ drive in a windows\windows32 folder.

type c: and hit enter - this should move you to the c drive!

[Moggy Cattermole]

Cheers, mate. I really am totally lost by all this, so sorry if I'm missing some obvious things here. Just entering it... ah, right, I'm now on
c:\Games and Stuff>

brilliant, cheers

[F22-Raptor-2006]

moggy there may possibly also be an option of a repair CD thing. I believe it should if you have a copy of windows CD check and make comparisons between ur computer windows install and the original CD and then copy over the various things to fix it so that it's identical to the original on the CD. Then it should start up etc... I tried to do this before on one of my computers. However it kept saying my password was wrong even though it was correct... and wouldn't let me do it... so from now on i don't have user account password on windows to avoid that problem again. Maybe this is something you can try after backing up ur games. I would say it wouldn't interfere with ur other files but who knows...

In the end i took out the hard drive of that laptop and put it into a little container thing and plugged it into a desktop so using it as an external hard drive... had to use 2 USB slots to power it, the container allowed up to 3... Then backed up the data etc...