Your business computer may contain tens of thousands of files, but you can still create a listing of each one on a drive, whether it's the drive inside the computer or an external one. You may find such a file listing useful if you need an inventory record of a hard drive's contents. Windows doesn't have a button that allows you to list every file on your hard drive, but you can perform this task using the Command window that comes with every Windows installation.

1 Click the Windows Start button and type "cmd" in the Start menu's search box. Click "cmd.exe" in the list that appears to open the Command window.

2 Type the "cd" command, followed by "/" to tell the Command window to switch to your hard drive's root drive. This is usually the "C" drive. If you would like to list the files on another drive, type that drive's drive letter followed by a colon and press "Enter." To switch to your "E" drive, type the following: E:

3 Type the "tree" command with the "/f" switch -- to display file names -- and the "/a" switch -- to use plain text -- followed by the name of the file where you would like to store the file listing into the window: tree /f /a > myFile.txt Press "Enter."

4 Specify the exact location of the file instead if you wish. If you would like to store the listing in a file named All_Files.txt in a folder named Listings on your C drive, the command would appear as listed below: tree /f /a > C:\Listing\All_Files.txt Press "Enter."

Tips After creating a file listing, you can view at any time by launching Windows Explorer and opening the text file you created. This could be a fairly large file if your hard drive contains many files.

The tree command not only lists all your files, but it creates a tree that shows the names of the folders in which the files reside. After opening the text file that contains your file listing, you can use your text editor’s Find feature to find a specific folder by name in that file. You can then view the files that reside in that folder.

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