Copies the entire contents of one floppy disk to another floppy disk. DISKCOPY writes over the existing contents of the destination disk as it copies the new information to it.
This command determines the number of sides to copy based on the source drive and disk.
DISKCOPY /?
DISKCOPY [drive1: [drive2:]] [/1] [/V] [/M]
For information about copying one or more files, see the
COPY command.
For information about copying directories and subdirectories,
see the XCOPY command.
For information about comparing two disks to see if they are
identical, see the DISKCOMP
command.
FC - Compare two files or sets of
files, and display the differences between them.
The DISKCOPY command works only with uncompressed removable disks such as floppy disks. You cannot use DISKCOPY with a hard disk or a network drive. If you specify a hard disk drive for drive1 or drive2, DISKCOPY displays the error message:
Invalid drive specification
Specified drive does not exist
or is non-removable
The DISKCOPY command prompts you to insert the source and destination disks and waits for you to press any key before continuing.
After copying, DISKCOPY displays the message:
Copy another diskette (Y/N)?
If you press Y, DISKCOPY prompts you to insert source and destination disks for the next copy operation. To stop the DISKCOPY process, press N.
If you are copying to an unformatted floppy disk in drive2, DISKCOPY formats the disk with the same number of sides and sectors per track as are on the disk in drive1. DISKCOPY displays the message while it formats the disk and copies the files:
Formatting while copying
If the capacity of the source disk is greater than that of the destination disk and your computer can detect this difference, DISKCOPY displays the message:
Drive types or diskette types not compatible
If the source disk has a volume serial number, DISKCOPY creates a new volume serial number for the destination disk and displays the number when the copy operation is complete, since v4.0
If you omit the drive2 parameter, DISKCOPY uses the current drive for drive2. If you omit both drive parameters, DISKCOPY uses the current drive for both. If the current drive is the same as drive1, DISKCOPY prompts you to swap disks as necessary.
When you use a single drive as both the source and destination drive, DISKCOPY stores an image of the source disk in the directory specified by the %TEMP% environment variable. If there is not enough space on that drive to contain the source-disk image, you might have to swap floppy disks. DISKCOPY prompts you each time you should insert a disk in the drive. DISKCOPY reads from the source disk, writes to the destination disk, and prompts you to insert the source disk again. This process continues until the entire disk has been copied.
Because DISKCOPY makes an exact copy of the source disk on the destination disk, any fragmentation on the source disk is transferred to the destination disk. Fragmentation is the presence of small areas of unused disk space between existing files on a disk.
A fragmented source disk can slow down the finding, reading, or writing of files. To avoid transferring fragmentation from one disk to another, use either the COPY command or the XCOPY command to copy your disk. Because COPY and XCOPY copy files sequentially, the new disk is not fragmented.
If you use the DISKCOPY command to copy a startup disk, the copy will also be a startup disk. If you use COPY or XCOPY to copy a startup disk, the copy usually will not be a startup disk.
none.