[Bob T]

XP Pro_SP3

About three months ago I purchased two identical external
hard drives. They both have USB and eSATA ports.

XP Disk Management shows the partitions on these drives
as healthy.

I use FAT32 with one drive, so it can be recognized by older
systems like 98SE. The other is NTFS.

I've got them plugged in through their eSATA ports. I'm
trying to copy a large group of files from an FAT32 partition
on one drive, to a NTFS partition on the other.

After a few seconds of copying something goes wrong. XP
displays a dialog box and some kind of warning about hardware
failure in the system tray. The drive partitioned with NTFS
vanishes from My Computer. If I turn the power off and on it
comes right back. Again, Disk Management show this drive as
healthy. Hardware problems are always a possibility, but all
the years I've lived with Windows has taught me to look for
system problems first and always!

The only difference between the two is their file systems. As
far as I know, XP should have no problems copying files between
two drives with different file systems.

Is there any reason to think that the different file systems may
be causing this problem? Should I use another app to copy these
files, instead of relying on XPs own copy command? If not, what
can I try that might resolve this problem?

[Mike0001]

I would try the free synctoy app from Microsoft to do this. See how that gets on. It will only replicate a group of folders onto another location but it might do.

[philthomas]

Try updating your SATA Driver and run chkdsk on both drives ..... see if either helps.