The Notion to Blog

This morning wanted to copy a folder from a very expensive flash drive to my PC.  When I copied and then pasted the folder via Explorer i got this message: “Error Copying File or Folder.  Cannot copy file: Cannot read from the source file or disk”

This must be an serious insurmountable error for Windows XP for it to throw such a serious message. I have the latest service packs and patches so its not my system that’s out of date.

So if it can’t copy I figured something must be seriously wrong with my expensive flash drive.   Its probably corrupt and I need to go and shout at the vendor that I bought it from that he sold me a piece of junk.

To cut a long story short I eventually found out that it was Microslop Windows XP that had issues.  I noticed that some of the files had a “:”  (a colon or other forbidden characters) in it.  Other good operating systems (Linux) don’t mind these in the filename.  So when Windows XP sees this it throws the above error.

You’d think after 20 years they would have perfected the art of doing a simple operation like copying files.   Its not an error, its a restriction you idiots!

Something like this would have been more appropriate:

I Googled a work around but alas, there is none.  I had to rename the file using Linux and then try again.