CompactFlash: Don't Use XCOPY
 

So I was racking my brains trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. I had a directory full of subdirectories and mp3s on my PC and a freshly formatted compactflash card. I brought up a command prompt in the root of the mp3 directory chain and issued the command:

xcopy *.* h:\ /S /V /F /I

where H: was my CompactFlash card. I thought I was bloody brilliant - this should recreate the directory structure and copy the mp3s to the CompactFlash card. And it did, too! Just like I told it too!

Except for one thing - the G35 had no bloody idea where the songs or directories were when I inserted the card. "No Songs" was my fate.

I can't tell you how many things I tried, walking back and forth to the G35 each time, trying to figure out why it couldn't recognize the card.

So it turns out that xcopy was the culprit. When I use copy this doesn't happen. So now, I dump a "dir /b /s /O:N" to a text file and edit it to do individual copies to the CompactFlash card. It's the only way I can ensure that the files are written to the card in the order that I want (and are therefore displayed in that order in the G35 music browser).

It's a pain, huh? But there - hopefully I've saved you some time if you're running into this problem too.

We morons like to do the following:

1. Ctrl + A
2. Right-click
3. Copy
4. Right-click
5. Paste


...and I'm a network engineer... :rolleyes:

... ;) :p :D

wow- yeah, I just put the CF card in the 'puter, browse to it using windows explorer, and copy/paste my music folders onto it.

I have NO idea what your talking about up there... is that like DOS stuff? haha

OK, how many of you use the compact flash cards that much? I mean I am all about the hard drive and have put 19 disks on the drive in my first 110 miles (roughly). I don't know if I personally ever see myself using the compact flash card slot with the slight exception of some songs that I don't have an actual CD for.

As for the OP - I have no idea why you would have to go through any of that. LOL Glad you found a fix for your problem though.

hey it just so happens so am i lol...even though i work at a car dealership im the unofficial IT guy...( that means the owner who is my cousin knows that he gets expensive work done for free) lol.

i use it...i use the HD for full albums and the cf card for just mixed songs...i have them in order by folders of the artist name then each folders contains the artist specific ( or style of music) songs.

Yeah, I am in Civil Engineering and get stuck doing all the IT in my office as well. I HATE it! We have an offsite IT guy, but he SUCKS when he does show. I still don't know what the OP was trying to do, but like someone else said, I am glad he figured it out! :biggthumpup:

I rarely use the jukebox because I stopped buying CDs like 10 years ago. Most all of my music is downloaded from Napster (legally) which I can load to my MP3 player and hook up via Aux. ports. Recently though, I found a new program, Tunebite (thanks to SPEEED, I think:confused2: ) which allows me to convert my digital music from wma files to mp3s and put them on the CF card. Which makes it a little less cumbersome. In summary :D All of my music is digital, so I dont have the CDs to rip to the hard drive, I WISH I could copy from CF the hard drive, that would be amazing...

Wow, this takes me back to the day. I used to pound out those DOS commands with all those arguments memorized. And don't get me started with the UNIX c-shell arguments.

I still do file operations like this once in a while if some young kid in the office is looking over my shoulder! :)

Gorn: are you a unix user turned windows user? If not, you should switch to Linux or *BSD :).
At work, whenever I have to help someone else on a windows workstation I always pop up a dos prompt and use that for everything. cmd.exe sucks compared to bash.

That's odd that xcopy doesn't work though. I'm going to have to give it a try sometime. I just use unix cp -r to do most of my copying to cf (Linux user) and never have any problems.

All of you explorer/GUI people, I feel for you. You need to use a real OS :).

XCOPY ? I think the last time I used that I was setting up a Win95 machine at Security Pacific (now Nations Bank) I don't even remember what I was doing.

xcopy is the only way to do recursive copy out of the box in windows from the command line. What Gorn was trying to do was preserve the folder structure of the files and not do it through copying from the GUI. The built in "copy" command on the windows command line is woefully inadequate for anything but basic use.

Where is an admin?? someone needs to change dopey's title to 'resident computer nerd'. FYI dopey, I mean that in the nicest way! :eek3:

haha.. yeah, i'm a bonafide computer geek. write code and play with systems all day at work. come home, and my wife has to drag me away from my office :)

OK, 'Resident Computer Geek' if your prefer. :bowrofl: