Solved Directories Not Showing Up In Windows Explorer

[Arbfarkle]

Background:
I am using a 12+ year old Compaq pentium running XP.
1. Lately getting blue screens.
2. Heard that XP is no longer supported.

Since I was happy with the Compaq I bought a Envy from HP. It had Windows 8 installed.
Hey, I'm naive I thought that 7 must not have been very good and 8 was an upgrade.
I installed classic shell and was having hopes that I could get around in 8.
Then I saw that 8.1 was out and was an improvement. I figured that I might as well try the latest.
That seemed to take away some of the things that Classic shell had provided as well as my local account.
I found someone to take out that stuff and put in Windows 7 Pro.

Now the problem.


I copied Windows 8.1 (at least some of it) to a plug-in disk. I copied XP to another plug-in disk.
I used command prompt to make a directory named XP and another called W8. Still in command prompt, and using Xcopy /s /e I copied the disks into the Windows 7 machine. BUT when I try to find them in Windows explorer they don't show up. I believe that from the amount of free space that they do exist. Also,I can cd into them. However I was hoping to be able to drag and drop files that I thought that I needed. When I try to make a directory using Windows explorer, the computer tells me that it already exists and wants to know if I want to merge them. Still they don't show up on windows explorer.

Should I just rd the directories and start the copy process over?
Will rd work since they are not empty?

Thanks for any help that anyone can give.

 

[Ztruker]

Try taking ownership of the XP and W8 directories.

An easy way here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1911-take-ownership-shortcut.html?ltr=T

 

[Arbfarkle]

Sounds interesting. I don't know how to click on a directory that I can't see the name of in Windows Explorer. I had thought of just clicking the whole drive C: but there is a warning to not do that.
Thank you for your help. Looks like 7 may be more complicated than I expected. Again thanks.

 

[Ztruker]

Catch-22, sorry, forgot about that.

Try this instead.

Open a Elevated Command Prompt by clicking the Start button and typing cmd. Right click on cmd.exe that shows at the top left of the Start menu and select Run as Administrator.

Type takeown /f directory /r /a and press Enter.

directory would be the full path of the XP and W7 directories you created. Do them one at a time.

Enter takeown /? from the elevated command prompt to get usage information that explains what /f, /r and /a do.

 

[whs]

My guess would be that they landed in the root of C: or in C:\Users\Your name