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General discussion

Copying video documentation onto an external hard drive

Jan 14, 2005 2:26AM PST

I'm not sure if this is the right forum to ask this, but I hope it's close enough. I recently purchased an external hard drive and wanted to move some mpeg video files over to it to free up some hard disk space. For some reason, the documentation that you see when you right-click on the file properties is not transferring over along with the file content. This doesn't seem to be the case with my mp3's -- all of the tag information comes right along. Only with the MPEG files is this the case. Does anyone know why this is, or how to fix it? I can't really use the drive as a proper backup solution if I am losing information in the transfer.

Discussion is locked

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Copy Video
Jan 14, 2005 12:27PM PST

I don't understand.

What documentation?

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documentation
Jan 15, 2005 7:51AM PST

The file documentation info you see when you right-click on the file and click on properties. There are usually 2 tabs: General and Summary. General tells you what type of file it is, where it is, how large, and when created and accessed. Summary is where you find things like title, subject, author, comments, track info, etc. When my files are transferred to the external hard drive, only the General tab is there. The Summary tab disappears. I am wondering now if it has something to do with the file system. My new external drive says the file system is FAT32, and my computer is NTFS. I don't know if there is a way to change this on the new drive or if this is the cause of the problem. Any ideas out there?

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Documentation
Jan 15, 2005 11:14AM PST

OK - I found an .mpg file with the Summary tab.

I used Windows Explorer and using the Right Mouse button, drug the file to my second hard disk. Then I told it to COPY.

I got a pop-up window called "Confirm Stream Loss".
"the file has extra information attached to it that might be lost if you continue copying". The information that may be lost was "Document Summary Info."

I told it to copy anyway. When I checked the properties, the Summary tab was gone.

I did the same thing but copied from my C: disk to a different location on the C: disk. No pop-up this time and when I checked, the file the Summary Tab was still there.

My C: disk is NTFS and my second hard drive is FAT32.

If NTFS/FAT32 is a factor, I don't know.
It could be just that the file was moved to another disk.
I haven't a clue why.
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I suggest that you also post this on the WinXP Forum:

http://reviews.cnet.com/5204-6142-0.html?forumID=5&start=0&tag=cnr

Good Luck...

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not because it's another disk
Jan 15, 2005 9:47PM PST

I also tried sending the file to another hard drive -- the other computer on my home network. It didn't happen. So I am almost sure it's the FAT32 thing. Do you know of a way to convert the external hard drive to NTFS?