Problems Moving To amd64

[Graham Todd]

Before I changed my computer to an amd64 from an AMD Athlon+, I copied
my /usr and /home partitions to an external hard drive.

When I tried to copy the data over, I found the directories had been
kept, but not the files; even the directories are empty!  It was
galling to find my gnupg infomation, my mailfilter rc file, and my data
from Kmail and Claws-Mail was missing...

So I tried copying the data to DVDs, and when that was not recognised,
I tried copying a limited number of files alone, and none appeared on
the amd64 machine.

Is this a known problem and does anyone know what is the solution?  Is
it something silly I've done?

I can't just move the drives from one machine to another as the Athlon+
drives are IDE and the amd64 drives are SATA.  Other than that, any
help would be appreciated.

-- 

Graham Todd