cdm won't copy directories with long names

Hi.

I am hoping someone knows a cmd string that will allow me to copy a desktop folder and its subfolders, or at least the files within, to an external drive on a laptop that crashed with what looks like a bad mother board and it will no longer boot to Windows.


I have two folders on my desktop that will not copy, due to "Too many parameters"

I did not know about the issue with long directory names. In fact, I only taught myself basic DOS commands TODAY. I managed to get all my user documents, pictures etc. saved to external drives, and most of my desktop.

Except for the two that say "Too many parameters"

One is called "Media Temp" and the other is called "Martin strings video 2018"

When I copy the entire desktop these two directories are left out.

I assume it is because of the spaces and lengths of those names. When I try to copy them specifically I am told Invalid number of parameters.

Both contain subfolders and the latter has multiple folders of videos I shot that exist nowhere else -

Is there any way I can get these??


I will add...

When I copied the entire User directory, there is an icon for Desktop, but even with hidden files turned on I see only a few links of 1 or 2kb, but when I went to delete it, it was over 5 gigs and contained over 72 thousand items. But since I could not access them for some reason, I permanently deleted them.

My Sager laptop won't boot to Windows (wheels spins once, then screen goes black, flashes and then the little light flickers next to the on light saying basically "can't talk to hard drive."

Thanks

tspnyc said:

I have two folders on my desktop that will not copy, due to "Too many parameters"
...One is called "Media Temp" and the other is called "Martin strings video 2018"

It's the spaces in the names, they are seen as a delimiter marking the end of one parameter and the beginning of the next. To make them be seen as a single parameter enclose the whole parameter in quotes. For the XCOPY command it would look something like this:

xcopy "Media Temp\*.*" "E:\Media Temp" /s

(the /S switch says copy subdirectories too)

THANK YOU, thank you, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!

I had read about the quotes but no one posted the correct syntax, so I had them in the wrong place.

Whew!

Glad to have helped, @tspnyc

Thank you also. It solved my problem creating a bat file to copy a file to a usb drive.