I’m installing a new Windows 10 computer in our office to replace the old Windows XP one. All this computer is going to do is host our shared windows disk. Not a lot of people use this disk, but it’s really good for sharing files or if a student is going to work at different computers in the lab.

I have about 1tb of data on the old XP computer that I want to copy to the new Windows 10 computer. And I’d like to keep permissions, ownership, etc. of all the files. I googled around and found that xcopy is the command that I want. Specifically, something like this:

xcopy s:\sw f:\sw /O /X /E /H /K

I started windows powershell and tried to run this as me, since my account is a domain administrator. That didn’t work. I always got access denied errors. So I tried to start powershell as administrator. Here, I couldn’t “see” the s: drive, which was a mapped drive. I even tried logging in as a local computer account and then manually mounting the s: drive. Powershell would not see the drive mounted that way.

The solution was to login with my local administrator account. Then start windows powershell as administrator. The in powershell, run net use s: \XPcomputer\sw, where I’d be prompted for my login credentials on our samba/ldap domain. Then, I could run:

xcopy s:\* f:\sw /O /X /E /H /K

What I found interesting is that after I did the net use command, I couldn’t see the S: drive if I went to “This PC” even though it was currently copying from the S: drive. The screenshot below shows this. I found this weird. This may also have been true in earlier versions of windows, but I had never come across this before.