Hi, I'm running out of disk space on my primary drive C:\ so I want to move some folders to my secondary drive D:\. But I want to do that without affecting the Modified or Created date/time stamps on the folders. I'm finding unfortunately that if I copy or move folders between drives, the Modified and Created date/time stamps get changed. If I Winzip the folders and extract them on D:\ the extracted folders retain the Created date/time stamp, but the Modified date/time stamp still gets changed. On the other hand, if I Winzip some folders from D:\ and extract them on to C:\, both the Modified and Created date/time stamps are retained. Does anyone understand this? Is my secondary drive D:\ improperly set up in some way? Do you have any ideas for how I can move folders from C:\ to D:\ while keeping both the Modified and Created date/time stamps unchanged? Thanks, J.

BTW, I just realized my C:\ drive is FAT32 and my D:\ drive is NTFS. I guess that maybe explains the different behavior ... If anyone has any suggestions for how I can move folders from C:\ to D:\ while keeping both the Modified and Created date/time stamps unchanged, I'd love to hear them.

That's what these different date/time stamps were created for, Jessica. Is it that important for you to retain the original Modified date/time stamps?. The only way you could retain them would be to use a very specific disk editor and change them on the folders one by one, or to use a disk-cloning software like Ghost to copy C: to D: (D: will be completely overwritten) and then erase the folders you don't want from D:. Andrés

Thanks for your reply Andres. I guess I was just used to the behavior I was seeing on FAT32: extracting from Winzip would leave both the Modified and Created timestamps as they were. So I was expecting the same on my NTFS drive. The other reason I was expecting this is that if I move folders within my FAT32 C:\ drive or within my NTFS D:\ drive, both the Modified and Created date/time stamps are left untouched. However, when I move folders from one drive to the other, the date/time stamps get changed. Is this simply an inconsistency in Windows 2000 or something specific to my system? I'll probably use the Winzip workaround to at least preserve the Created date/timestamp. J. ps. If anyone happens to know of a freeware utility that will recursively copy the Created date/timestamp to the Modified, please let me know.

Alright!. The difference between creation times when you copy folders is not an inconsistency, but a behavior by design. When you copy a folder, a new one is created and thus it has its own creation time. Although it doesn't serve your needs, this behavior is logical... too bad! I can't try it right now since I'm not on a Win2K machine, but try downloading a freeware program named XXCopy available here: http://www.xxcopy.com. It seems it is able to retain folder date/time stamps in the process, if you use the right commands. Take a look at it and tell me if it worked =). Andrés

Hi Andres, Yes and no. What you said about copying folders is true, but I was talking about moving folders. Thanks for the link you provided. I thought it was quite informative actually. Check out http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy15.htm - the section "Problems with the file creation date (File-Create date)" describes the inconsistencies. Observation 1 is as you said. Observation 2 is what I said. And Observation 3 explains the inconsistency. Basically, when you move a folder within a volume, the Modified and Created timestamps on the folder and its subfolders are preserved. So I expect the same behavior when I move a folder to a different volume, but hit the inconsistency that's caused by the move operation being implemented differently in that case. I tried using xxcopy, using the /E (copy subdirectories) and /KS flags (keep source attributes), but didn't get the results I wanted. Copying from C:\ (FAT32) to D:\ (NTFS) I got inconsistent results. With one folder I tried (2 directories, 3 files) it preserved only the Modified timestamp on the subdirectories. With another folder I tried (112 directories, 1279 files) both the Modified and Created timestamps on the subdirectories got set to the current time. If I copied that last folder from C:\ to another folder on C:\, only the Modified timestamp was preserved. So I guess xxcopy preserves only the Modified timestamp and that that is not always the case if copying across volumes. I think what I'll do is just fall back on the Winzip workaround. I think I can live with just having the Created timestamp preserved. But there is so an inconsistency! lol Thanks very much for your help Andres.