Ant said:
Hello.
Is it copy transfer many big files between two updated 64-bit W7 SP1
machines (Enterprise and Home Premium) with a regular network cable
without a network?
Thank you in advance.
In such a configuration, you have no DHCP. You'll need to
assign an IP address. If left alone, the computer will use
the APIPA address.
It suggests here, that the machines can use ARP to figure
out the APIPA address, without a conflict. So perhaps
you don't have to edit anything. If the machines are GbE
networking, you can use a regular Ethernet cable. If the
machines are 10/100BT, they might need a crossover cable.
Try the regular cable first, and see if it works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-local_address
If for some reason, that didn't work, you can use the
network control panel in the traditional way, set one
machine to 192.168.1.1 and the other to 192.168.1.2 .
You'll still need to know what the address is, if you
let the machine do this for itself automatically. You
can do "ipconfig" from a DOS prompt. In Windows 7, you
type "cmd" in the start thing, to get the DOS window so
you can run that. The APIPA could be in the vicinity
of 169.254.1.1 and 169.254.1.2 or so.
From the command prompt, you can now test your connection.
On machine 169.254.1.1, you can "ping 169.254.1.2" and
verify the network is up.
You can probably make a network connection, again, using an
IP address value, and once the share is visible, start
your transfer. While it is possible via a HomeGroup
or using identical workgroup values, you can get the file
share of one machine to just show up, you can also connect
using an IP address value to reach the other machine. That
cuts out the "browsing" phase of the setup. I use that
from flaky Ubuntu setups, where the OS can't seem to find
the Windows machines.
There are tools such as Windows Easy Transfer, that might
be suited to this as well, but I haven't a clue whether
that's appropriate at this point or not. I'd be more
interested in your approach, of just transferring things
the "regular way".
*******
Another novel way to transfer files, is to install the
web server that is available on certain versions of Windows.
(You look in Programs and Features, for the Windows Components
item, so you can enable the web server.) The web server
includes an FTP server. The advantage of using FTP, is
the possibility of slightly faster transfers, if say,
both machines had GbE networking. Windows File Sharing
can be a bit slower sometimes. So if I'm bored, I
might look into doing that on one end, and either
"put" or "get" each file. I might use such an approach
with multi-gigabyte files, but not for thousands of
smaller files. To transfer a file tree with FTP is a pain
unless you have the right kind of client software
(something more than a vanilla client).
You can always zip up a file tree, and make
one big file from it. That is, if you have sufficient
space on both machines. 7ZIP can be used to do that.
You select uncompressed ("store") mode, so the
zipping operation goes as fast as the disks can go.
And that way, you only have to specify one file
name, when transferring the whole lot, from one
machine to the other. I'd probably do that, if
using FTP for some reason. You don't want actual
compression to take place, because that takes too long.
(Has taken as long as 24 hours, to compress an entire disk.)
Using "store" mode doesn't save space, but makes it easier
to deal with a bunch of files, as a single file.
I expect I'm the only one interested in doing it this way
*******
You can take the side off the two machines, and move the
disk into the second machine, and just copy the files.
But where is the fun in that ?
Paul
