[JCW]

Just got a new western digital external hard-drive (My Book-pro) and using the drag and drop method I tried to copy my documents folder over to this new drive. I have done this with no problem to both my other internal drive as well as another wd external hard-drive.
As soon as I try and copy the folder over to the new drive I am getting a dialog box that quotes" you can not copy file name product#11/05.xls because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk can not display"
Of course I removed that file and the drive just found another file name it didn't like. Any advice on how to figure out what is going wrong or is this a sign this is a bad hard drive? using 10.3.9
Thanks for any insights or advice how to trouble shoot this problem. Jeff

[drmbb]

Is the drive formatted as FAT32? In windows, the "/" character is an illegal file name character. All of "? [ ] / = < > : ; " ," are disallowed in windows file names.

If you only use this drive with a Mac, I'd suggest re-formatting it to HFS with journaling so you won't have any file name issues between your laptop and the external drive.

[JCW]

ah yes page 3 of the spanish tale named "Manual" describes that. I apologize for the pre coffee post, but thank you for responding. Jeff