Difficulty copying files from memory card: crashes in Windows, Command Line

[prowsej]

I have a 4GB SD Card with photos and videos from my Christmas vacation. I want to copy the files to my computer. The problem that I am experiencing is that the copy is failing on certain files and this causes Windows explorer to crash and/or the command line (when using xcopy) to stop responding.

What I am doing:
1. Insert SD Card into built-in SD Card reader slot on my laptop
2. Use xcopy on the command line to copy all of the files from the memory card into a folder on my c: drive

Problem: xcopy fails on a particular file. When I delete this file, it will fail on another one. (I repeated this process a couple of times).

It appears from this that some files on my memory card may be corrupted. I want to copy as much data from my card as is still good. However, because I have a lot of pictures on the card, the process of manually deleting the bad data and then trying the copy again is cumbersome. What should I do?

Thank you.

I tried searching the forum and wasn't sure how to adapt advice given in similar threads to my particular situation.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

Is it a SDHC card? If so, your card reader may not be able to read the properly.

 

[prowsej]

It is an SDHC card, but my laptop (an HP Pavilion tx 2000) is supposed to be able to read 4GB type 2 SDHC cards.

I also experience the same behaviour regardless of whether I directly insert the card into my laptop's SD card slot or whether I have the card in the camera that I used to take pictures and then connect the camera to my computer via a USB cord. Which leads me to believe that it's not a card reader issue, but instead a card issue.

 

[lxskllr]

I wonder if a chkdsk /r would fix it?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Use one of those memory card file-recovery utilities.

 

[Tsaico]

It depends on the error. If you could post that, it woul be helpful. Xcopy has a few limitations, that will often crash it, such as total number of charaters in a name. And if you r camera is anything like mine, it uses a specific folder, then a subfolder for photos, then a really long ass filename that is the date, time, photosettings, etc.
I would also recommend using robocopy instead of xcopy. It is the next extension past the xcopy and also has a lot of new commands that are really handy, like a try again x number of times, if not then move on. If you use the move command instead, then you will have only the "dead" ones left on the card. Just be sure you set the retry to something 1 or something, since the default is 1 million. and the retry is also 1 million seconds. You can download it off MS website if you run win2k3 or XP, it already comes with Vista and windows 7,

 

[Modelworks]

Try teracopy . It uses different methods for copying files than other programs. It will also skip files that have errors and continue copying the rest.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php