I installed a new hard drive recently and now my computer seems to hang whenever it tries to access the disk.
Anything that goes to Dolphin (e.g. Firefox’s “save as” or kile’s “save as” etc.) often makes me wait a while before it brings up the “save as” (or other) dialogue. Note: this does not seem to happen right after a fresh reboot, only after I’ve been running for a while (at least 30+ minutes).
The new drive is a 1TB black Western Digital internal SATA. I also have 3 other SATA drives inside (a DVD drive and 2 other hard drives), plus 1 IDE internal hard drive, plus 1 external USB drive.
Please tell me what files I can provide to you to help diagnose the problem, where/how I can get those files for you (and the proper way to post them here).
Any ideas what is causing it?
Note, it behaves almost as if the drive were asleep and it takes a second to have it start running again (my USB drive used to do this if I hadn’t used it recently), HOWEVER now it does it even if I’ve just accessed the drive (even just 30 seconds ago).
Thank you for any help.
Rick
(Could it be Dolphin? Might switching to Nautilus solve it? How do I do that (install nautilus and make it the default for everything?)
You do not tell if you use the new disk for anything. Adding a disk is an hardware action, but I assume you did more with it.
Thus do you e.g. partitions on it ad file systems on those partitions that yoy moiunt normaly?
Also, when (part of) that disk is mounted, I would to test outside Dolphin (or any file manager). E.g. by doing an
ls -l
from somewhere inside that mounted part, to see if that also hangs for some time before giving the output. Because you certainly want to know if this is a system problem or a desktop/file manager problem.
I use the disk for most of the work I create (essentially the whole thing is a giant “My Documents” and “My Music” directory, so I’m using it more than anything other than the OS–but that (My Docs) is all that is on this physical drive). I’ve been using it a lot.
Today, Dolphin was working quickly (for save as, attach something to an email, etc.) for 5 hours and then just now it started taking a long time to save a file (10-25 seconds to pull up the save as window). While it was delayed, I can hear something in my computer tower start to run up to speed. You’d think that means the drive was in some kind of standby mode or something, but if I immediately try it again (as I just did when attaching 2 documents to an email), I don’t hear it run up to speed again, but it still takes 17 seconds (I counted “one-thousand, two-thousand,” etc.) even then. During the delay, I was able to open terminal, run “ls -l” (on that drive) and get my response before the dialogue window to choose the attachment file has appeared.
One thing that I don’t understand: the directories in this drive are all green (the files are in green text and the directories are dark blue on green background).
Right now my drive setup is
(physical drives)
sda1 Win XP (SATA)
sdb1 openSUSE (SATA – sdb1 linux native ext4 (156MB); sdb2 linux LVM 298GB)
sdc1 backup driver for “My Documents” “Music” etc (USB drive – NTFS 1.8TB)
sdd1 My Documents, etc. (SATA – NTFS 931GB)
sde1 an old Win XP drive (IDE - NTSF 112GB)
I should note I formatted the new drive in NTFS because I wanted to be able to access all my documents from my Windows XP boot also. I haven’t used it from Win XP yet though (I use openSUSE 12.1 85% of the time).
Any ideas what might be causing the delay.
Thank you for trying to help with so many questions!
But as you use non-Linux file system for these data, the software that handles those NTFS file systems has to make assumptions about those things not available in NTFS, but needed in Linux (like owner, group, access bits). And fake them. Thus I guess that all the files have got an execute bit set. And then *ls *thinks they are executables, which indeed it shows green on a colour terminal emulation.