Windows 7 Can only copy a few items at a time from external hard drive

[Chef]

I'm trying to copy 6,400 songs or 28 GB worth of music from my Seagate External Hard Drive to my Windows 7 PC. At first I tried CTRL+A, CTRL+C and then tried to paste them into a folder called "music" that I created on my "C" drive. That didn't work so I tried right clicking copying and pasting. No luck.

I then selected only one folder. That copied and pasted. So I can move about 50 songs at a time. Is this the only way? Or am I missing something? I've done this on other computers with no problems.

Thanks for the help!


*Note: I have plenty of room on my HD. about 400 GB.

 

[Elmer]

This may, or not, be connected. I was moving folders (18Gb) around to different partitions which slowed to a crawl, as in, 4 days to go!!
I ran disk clean up to remove all junk/temp files from my system and got a much better (58 min) transfer time afterwards. Might be worth a try.
That's saying that all things are being equal, your external and internal can cope with a much faster/cleaner transfer rate. Which it sounds as though it should.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

It may also be that you have a bad file in there someplace that stops the process.
I've had this happen often. As soon as Windows hits something that it can't copy it just stops or give you a generic can't do that.

The problem is with as many files as you have I don't know how you would identify it.

What I would try is to make a folder on your external drive called Moving or something like that and then drag say 6 of your music folders into that. This is almost instantaneous since it doesn't really move them, just changes the address.

Then try and copy that folder to your hard drive.

If it works then move the folders you copied back to the original location (if you want them to stay on the external drive) and drag in 6 more and so on. It should ask you if you want to combine the folder with the existing one and keep adding the music folders to it.

I'ts faster then doing it one at a time.

Once you get all the music folders transferred you can rename the moving folder to what ever you want.

Mike