I am having trouble accessing my files on one of my hard drive and I was wandering if I can copy the files of that hard drive onto another hard drive. I booted up in Command Prompt and i typed in "copy tongzm~1" and it started copying but after it was done copying i don't know what to do next. One question, is command prompt and DOS the same thing? Because if it is then I won't get confused or confuse you guys/gals.

the command prompt is a DOS emulator. For windows XP, we don't have DOS underneath (the command prompt just simulates rudimentary operations)...but in an XP forum, when we mean go to DOS, it either means to do it in a command prompt...or reboot using a win 9x/me boot disk (if you have a fat or fat32 filesystem...it won't work if you have ntfs) as for making a copy of the hard drive...i don't think there is a recursive dos command for it...you might want to try a program like Symantec Ghost to make a copy of your hard drive...and then restore it after reformating. What kind of problem are you having when you try to access your files?

you should be able to open 2 instances of explorer one for the HD you wish to copy from and the other for the copy to. now you can drag and drop files at leisure

What does the computer do when I type in "copy tongzm~1" it read all the files from that directory and then at the end it said "copied 745 files." Now do I paste it somewhere or what? The problem is that I just want to copy only certain files onto another hard drive and then reformat the old one. I have two 40 GB hard drives. I can't start windows XP and so I can't just drag and drop through the use of windows. So i was wandering if I can use command prompt to do it and not under Windows.

Dos copy command copy (source) (destination) eg copy C:\files\file.set D:\file you need to give it a destination

you cant get into ME either??

No I can get into ME just not XP. Can I copy files from one hard drive to another using the copy command. So I can move all the files that I need onto the hard drive with ME. Then after I moved the files I can reformat the problem hard drive and start over. I'm gonna go give it a try.