Hi

This is the strangest thing I've seen so far in Linux. I've been using Linux for about 4 years though I am not an expert. I have two USB external hard disks. One 2.5" using power form USB and the other a normal IDE hardisk in a USB enclosure with external power. I've had problems of playing video (mpg) files from these hard disks. I have two machines, one PC clone and the other an HP compaq nx9010 notebook. I had the same experience with both machines and both hard disks. The video takes a long time to start and the frames move about 1/50 th of the normal speed. So I thought that it's something with usb. But this problem is not there when I tried with WinXP on the same machines, same external usb disks and same video files. But once in a while, the video starts playing correctly on Linux. But couldn't figure out the pattern. Now I found out that if a file is being copied to the external hard disk while the video is playing the video would play correctly. But that file needs to be a large file. I tested with a 32 MB mpg file and if I copied a file larger than the mpg file, the video would play. I started Totem player but the video was very very slow then I just dragged and dropped an 82 MB file from one dir to another in the external hard disk and the video started to move. This worked every time. This is very very strange as if the hard disks needs a push to start reading buy writing something. Any idea what the cause of this?

Thanks

Neranjana

I created a shellscript that copied a 2bite file from one place in the usb disk to anothre place. This goes on in a loop. When this happens, the system can read from the USB disk. It looks like the system cannot read large files from the external usb disk unless a file is being copied to the disk. Does anybody know how to fix this?

I had a similar problem and found <http://kerneltrap.org/node/4094> very useful.