Hi there, not sure if this fits in here but it’s not common you’ll hear this.
Anyways, I have done a backup on my system and each time I try to send it to an external drive, it never finishes.
As soon as the transfer starts, the CPU usage jumps at least to 75% and the transfer goes on. Eventually, I can see the transfer rate drop all at once to a stall, and the system freezes on me, sometimes locking up.
I thought my distro was screwed, as I had no errors on the console (still hangs though) so I went and wipe/reinstalled it. Well, before I did that, I tried a Kubuntu live environment, making sure that the distro would be the problem. In Kubuntu, the transfer rates went on without a problem. Backed up all the stuff needed.
Now, I reinstalled Opensuse, and the problem…is back.
What could cause my system to hang and see my CPU skyrocket like this over a transfer of files?
All HDDs have passed the diagnostic tests.
Ah, I forgot to add this; my /home directory dates from well over a year and some, if not the majority of configs comes from an old Sabayon setup. I had no issues before, but…you never know…
Sorry, I was a little short on time and I didn’t clarify much.
The drive I’m copying to is a NTFS drive, and the source partition is Ext4. I am copying files via Dolphin.
As the transfer starts, it goes fine (30-50MB/s) but at any given time, it drops down to 11KB/s and then it either stops (locks system up), locks KDE up or I can stop the transfer. The NTFS drive is either unaccessible afterwards or the files copied are corrupted.
I also forgot to mention that I burned a copy of Opensuse 12.2 on this machine and the install went badly. Bad checksums and couldn’t unmount a temp folder. That was fixed by downloading and burning it on another fresh machine.
When I loaded a Kubuntu live environement, none of that happened. It’s as if it didn’t ever happened.
As I was working, the more I thought of it, it might have to do with all the configs and **** in my /home partition. If it didn’t happen on a live distro (using a seperate home mount) and it happened as soon as I reinstalled Opensuse, I’m starting to think that my /home folders (.kde4, and company) are screwed up. I mean, it seen Sabayon 7, 8 and Opensuse 12.1, 12.2.
If my memory recalls, I had a few updates via Apper to install, which I did. I think something in there made it shaky like this. Anyways, it’s a theory.
If you feel the need to move it to the best section in the forum, go for it. Like I said, I wasn’t sure where to put it, so I chose here, as it had to do with storage copying/transfer issues.
On 2012-12-11 22:46, lhuser wrote:
>
> Sorry, I was a little short on time and I didn’t clarify much.
>
> The drive I’m copying to is a NTFS drive, and the source partition is
> Ext4. I am copying files via Dolphin.
Writing to NTFS in Linux is CPU intensive, and it can happen that the
utilities here are broken and not in Ubuntu (but I know of no reports on
this). It can also be caused by a filesystem that is already damaged, so
I would do a good filesystem check from inside Windows.
> If you feel the need to move it to the best section in the forum, go
> for it. Like I said, I wasn’t sure where to put it, so I chose here, as
> it had to do with storage copying/transfer issues.
But multimedia is not related to “storage copying/transfer”, I think.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Like I said, I wasn’t sure about where to go for it.
Well, another fresh install, clean /home partition, the external hard drive transfer is fine. However, when I copy files from an Ext4 partition to another Ext4 partition, the system freezes. Before that happens, I can see it coming. The performance lags a little, then applications takes a million hours to respond and then it locks up.
I’m aware that my Nvidia driver isn’t iinstalled yet. I’ve played with the wiring inside, making sure no connections were loose. Unfortunately, I had to leave for work so I will keep you updated later on duri g the day.
On 2012-12-12 12:36, lhuser wrote:
>
> Like I said, I wasn’t sure about where to go for it.
>
> Well, another fresh install, clean /home partition, the external hard
> drive transfer is fine. However, when I copy files from an Ext4
> partition to another Ext4 partition, the system freezes. Before that
> happens, I can see it coming. The performance lags a little, then
> applications takes a million hours to respond and then it locks up.
I understand that it is the same hard disk in all cases? I would verify
the disk using SMART tools.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
It is actually from another drive, but I tried on the same drive and it does the same thing. However, I believe I found out why it did that, along side the CPU3 having soft lock ups. When seeing this notification, I then thought about bad RAM or RAM bank (motherboard) or CPU (which I hardly doubted.
Well, as I suspected, I have a bad RAM stick. It sucks because I was equipped with 16GB and the fact that it went south lately sure ticks me off, but eh…it’s computer hardware. My transfers now copies great. I still have Firefox bugging out the system with the forum’s autosave feature, but I don’t plan to work with Firefox anyways. Also explains X crashing with a BUG error on CPU0, 1 or 3.
I might have data corruption, but it’s nothing too sensible.
Again, thanks! That hard drive diagnostics and these error about soft lock up and other strange happenings are now explained due to faulty memory.
Indeed.
Check this out;
I had a false result of a failing hard drie (even though it was good, tested good afterwards), kernel bugs, as well on Kubuntu live distro. It screwed up a NTFS drive with sensible data…that I’m not happy with. Random lock ups, installation of OpenSUSE locked up on second reinstall. Dropping rates following with a lock up.
I should of checked it way before, especially when the transfer went fine on my Dell running 12.2. My distro install was fine after all.
On 2012-12-13 02:26, lhuser wrote:
>
> Indeed.
> Check this out;
> I had a false result of a failing hard drie (even though it was good,
> tested good afterwards), kernel bugs, as well on Kubuntu live distro. It
> screwed up a NTFS drive with sensible data…that I’m not happy with.
> Random lock ups, installation of OpenSUSE locked up on second reinstall.
> Dropping rates following with a lock up.
Supposedly memory chips have, or had, parity bits. An error in the
memory would be caught by the hardware and launch an exception, the
computer would normally freeze there, not continue happily.
I understand there are also chips with two parity bits, they can correct
some of the errors.
You normally trust the computer to do things right…
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)