I was replicating the data of one external hard drive to another by use of a simple xcopy F:\*.* E:\*.* /s/d/y instruction and in the meantime with the data transfer scrolling in the command shell I was on Facebook and also had World of Warcraft running, and I have the game sound set to about 50% so that if I am playing music it is louder than the game. During the XCOPY process transferring about 206GB of data I heard a BEEP which came not from the internal PC speaker, but instead it came from the 5.1 sound system that is connected to my computer.

I was like... hmm, that is weird I will check on the shell window and it was still chugging away making a mirror copy of the other external hard drive. Oh well back to gaming, and then about 45 min later BEEP again. Ok this is strange...hmm.. Ok lets start Speedfan and check temps in this system. Temps are good and the CPU is at 43C with everything multitasking, ok I will set the graph of the speedfan and go back to gaming.

Then once again about 20 minutes later a quick 1/2 second BEEP. Ok lets look back at the TEMP graph... well it held steady between 41C and 44C for CPU and all other temps are normal. TIME to exit speedfan and go back to gaming.

XCOPY process ended. Closed the shell window and no more random beeps.

Gamed for 2 days and multitasked with all sorts of stuff running and no beeps.

Last night I went to update the 2nd external hard drive with the 1st external and started the same xcopy routine, and about 10 minutes later BEEP. Hmm... ok interesting so the random BEEP is directly related to this xcopy transfer process, although I have never seen xcopy cause a BEEP when its just xcopy and a simple instruction.

I have also looked into the EVENT logs of the Windows system to see if there was anything going on and its clean.

Anyone have any suggestions on what is going on? I am running Windows 7 32-bit with 3GB RAM and AMD Athlon X2 4450B 2.3Ghz CPU, and I probably should be using robocopy, but I like xcopy.

Posted this here because it seems to be directly related to XCOPY running on this computer when copying data between these 2 external hard drives connected at USB 2.0.

If it were every file causing a beep it would be this, but its very random and infrequent, and the data tested afterwards is an exact copy in file & folder count as well as capacity, so its not like its making a beep to an error condition during the copy process: http://strangetalk.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=104507

*** One problem I did have before all of this was that I was going to create an exact copy of this external to my local C: drive in folder named C:\ExtBackup\ but after a short while I would see no activity on the external and go to check on the shell window and I would find "Insufficient Memory" error. Looking this up since I have plenty of RAM, I found out that it was caused by the destination path greater than 254 characters in length. So I changed the folder to C:\x\ and it was then shorter than 254 characters and the error message no longer popped up, so i have some data on this external that is of long destination paths.It seems Xcopy does give warning beeps. Could these be when it finds existing destination FILES?

It doesn't make any noise here:

Code: [Select]@echo off
md testabc
echo abc >testabc\test.tmp
copy testabc\test.tmp .
xcopy test.tmp testabc\
pause
del testabc\test.tmp
del test.tmp
rd testabc
You'd THINK that Googling for e.g. "Xcopy beep" or "Xcopy beeps when" would shed some light, but I couldn't find much. An OS/2 cmd script I found had this:


/* Check if filespec exists to avoid xcopy beeps */
IF \FileExist( FileName) THEN
LEAVE

also I believe there have been a number of Xcopy versions for Windows; I wonder if some beep and some don't?

It seems that Xcopy and Robocopy do sometimes beep and this has puzzled a number of people:

Quote

The beeps that are sometimes heard when robocopy is running seem to correspond to situations when a file that has a name that is too long or has characters that are not recognized by the operating system.

It has been suggested that the beep is just the operating system echoing a character that is represented by a sound, there will be many of these in a given file. This is more likely to be related to the file name as the contents of the file is not echoed during copy.

The beeps that are sometimes heard when robocopy is running seem to correspond to situations when a file that has a name that is too long or has characters that are not recognized by the operating system.

It has been suggested that the beep is just the operating system echoing a character that is represented by a sound, there will be many of these in a given file. This is more likely to be related to the file name as the contents of the file is not echoed during copy.