Comment 5 for bug 541937
Revision history for this message
| Adam Porter (alphapapa) wrote Re: Copying files to USB flash drive is extremely slow | #5 |
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1b1ed1a
(Get the code!)
I'm not sure, but bug 575749 may be related to this. Here's what happened:
I was still waiting for the two 1 GB files to copy to the 4 GB flash drive. It was taking so long that I decided to burn a DVD of the files while I was waiting, because it obviously would finish sooner! After putting the DVD in, KDE mounted it, but I was then unable to umount it because umount crashed with a buffer overflow error every time (see bug 575749).
Later I gave up on the whole process and decided to go ahead and reboot. I chose to restart from within KDE, but it only closed down the GUI and left me with a cursor on a black screen. I switched to tty2 and tried to log in, but the login script hung after displaying the welcome message and package-updates message--I got no prompt. I switched to another tty and logged in as another user, which worked immediately.
At this point I was not sure what to do: the file copy was still not finished, and I couldn't finish logging out to reboot. I couldn't even log in to a shell to kill the remaining processes! I hadn't set a root password yet, and the only other user account couldn't use sudo. It was looking like I was going to have to do a hard reset or SysRq sync and reboot.
I decided to go ahead and pull the flash drive while it was writing. Suddenly my tty login finished, the KDE log-out process continued, and I was able to umount the DVD.
So it appears that not only was the write to the USB drive extremely slow, but somehow it was blocking umount on my DVD drive, and blocking my tty login on the same user account that the write process was running as. This is crazy.