Moving this to new thread as indicated by Knurpht.
I am experiencing a similar problem with a new Dell desktop running SUSE 11.3 x64bit and a 1TB USB drive with separate power supply. Partitions are 500GB ext4 and 400GB FAT32. The external drive is for making backup copies of /home (including a w7x64 virtual m/c). We left the copy running overnight and in the morning it had only managed 30GB (of 220GB) before crashing. A new attempt crashed immediately.
I searched and found several similar reports since May 2010.
I am experiencing a similar problem with a new Dell desktop running SUSE 11.3 x64bit KDE 4.4.4 and a 1TB USB drive with separate power supply. Partitions are 500GB ext4 and 400GB FAT32. The external drive is for making backup copies of /home (including a w7x64 .vdi). We rebooted after setting up the external drive. We left the copy running overnight and in the morning it had only managed 30GB (of 220GB) before crashing. Two new attempts crashed SUSE immediately.
I searched and found several similar reports since May 2010. But the problem unexpectedly fixed itself. This is what happened:
tested the drive by backing up a Vista folder on another m/c to FAT32 partition (success)
Ran hdparm -t /dev/sdf to see drive was recognised (30MB/h)
Open tail in a terminal and tried /home again after mounting drive
tail -f /var/log/messages
SUSE crashed again! No output from tail of course. >:(
Restart. Drive was automatically mounted.
Copied one large (30GB) file. Success.
Deleted this.
Copied /home. Success: 180GB in about 1.5 hours. (33MB/s)
Set SUSE to automatically mount usb drives in the future. But someone in the forum said they heard there was a bug and you should mount manually. We’ll see.
So it appears the problem was fixed by SUSE crashing! Can anyone shed light on this behaviour.
Can you specify exactly what the type of the hard disk in your external USB drive is?
I am asking this because I suspect that you could have a modern drive with physical 4K sectors and a misaligned partition. That would explain the slow speed you are seeing with this drive.
Hi Vodoo, the HD is many km away and I have no access until Dec 26. This is what I know: brand new SATA Samsung USB drive marketed under the Iomega brand, 1 Terabyte, separate power source, preformated NTFS.
The machine is a new Dell Inspiron 570 MT with AMD Athlon II X2 240 (2,8GHz, 2MB) 64-bit, 4096MB RAM (4x1024) DDR3 Dual Channel 1 S. I removed W7 and reinstalled it as a virtual machine under SUSE.
With the work being done by my son-in-law, we used Expert Partitioner to delete the single NTFS partition on the external USB drive and created a 500GB EXT4 partition for SUSE’s backups and a 400GB FAT32 to back up a Vista laptop. Don’t know what happened to the other 10GB but as my first HD was a mighty 10MB (in the early 80s), I am happy to have 900GB.
I am pretty sure we took the default for sector size, etc. I get to format a HDD about once every four years so I practised first on a small USB drive here at home. Expert Partitioner had me spooked at first.