Errors copying files between external drives

[jacaman]

Hello, I recently purchased a new external hard drive and 'mass copied' (using copy & paste) the old drive's files onto the new - which took about 20 hours. Problem is: about 10 folders and 15 files are missing (out of 20k files). (They are almost all audio files and none are write-protected.) Something similar happened once before (also when transferring large files between two external drives)& I was able to fix it by comparing folders one by one and recopying any discrepancies. (Both drives are NTFS, by the way.) So my question is this: I'd previously assumed Windows checked & reported any problems in copying. Is this a problem with XP or with the hard drives themselves? And will I always need to manually check that Windows, in fact, made an exact copy?

 

[soundguruman]

If you copied folders, there's a tendency for files to wind up in folders that you never put them in. Look inside all the folders you copied.
And copy only the same types of files (like word files), don't intermix files that are being copied, do them like 10-20 at a time. Don't mix word files with say, JPEG files, just transfer word files at one time, or JPEG files at one time.
That's where you might loose track of the files, or where files wind up being put in existing folders by mistake, and unintentionally.