Diskcopy
Purpose:
Copies
the
contents
of
the
disk in
the
source
drive
to
the
disk in
the
target drive.
Syntax:
diskcopy
[drive:]
[drive:]
Comments:
The
first
drive:
option
is
the
source
drive. The
second
drive:
option
is
the
target drive.
If you
omit
both options, MS-DOS performs a single-drive
copy
operation
on
the
default drive.
If
you omit just
the
second
option,
MS-DOS uses
the
default drive as
the
target drive. In
either
case,
though,
diskcopy
destroys the
contents
of
the
target disk.
Diskcopy
prompts
you to insert
the
source
and target disks
at appropriate times and waits for you
to
press any key before
continuing.
After copying,
diskcopy
then
prompts
you
with
the
following
message:
Copy
another
diskette
(Y/N)?_
If
you press Y, MS-DOS
prompts
you
to
insert
source
and target
disks, and performs
the
next
copy
on
the
drives that you origi-
nally specified.
To
end
the
diskcopy
process, press
N.
Because disk space
is
not
allocated sequentially, disks that have
had a lot
of
files
created
and deleted
on
them
become
fragmented_
So,
the first free
sector
found by
diskcopy
becomes
the
next
sec-
tor
allocated, regardless
of
its location
on
the
disk.
A fragmented disk can delay finding, reading,
or
writing a file.
To
prevent
further fragmentation, you should use either
the
copy
command
or
the
xcopy
command
to
copy
your
disk, instead
of
using
the
diskcopy
command. Because
the
copy
and
xcopy
com-
mands
copy
files sequentially
to
a disk,
the
new
disk will
not
be
fragmented.
The
following command, for example, copies all files from
the
disk in drive A
to
the
disk in drive
B:
xcopy
a:*.*
b:
MS-DOS Commands
51
Diskcopy
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