[SOLVED] Cannot copy files to USB flash drive from internal HDD.

erik2282 · 09-08-2014, 10:36 AM

I have a 16gb usb drive that I know that its empty. I've formatted it twice; once with ext4 and the second time with fat32. I tried to copy a 3gig file to it and it looks like it starts to copy and then just stops and hangs and it never finishes copying.

Debian 7 stable.

Any ideas?

rtmistler · 09-08-2014, 11:00 AM

Using what, file roller, not sure if that or something else is in Debian?

Or have you been trying to use the cp command? Sudo should pretty much take care of that:

Code:

sudo cp <filename> /media/<mount-point>/.

Other things to check out are the physical size the disk is and some information about it. Things like:

Code:

mount
df -h

When you format it are you using fdisk and then mkfs.ext4?

erik2282 · 09-10-2014, 12:04 PM

I am not using the cli to copy, I am using the gui Dolphin file manager; right-click copy, right-click paste. I tried this morning with cp but it just sits there for a long time, pretty much same issue..

to format I use a gui program called gnome-disk-utility

Im at work, when I get home I'll put the flash drive in the machine and try again and get the info from df -h.

yancek · 09-10-2014, 01:01 PM

I would expect it to take some time to copy a 3GB file. If you are using dolphin, do you see a progress bar showing the copying? Have you set the permissions on the flash drive to allow a user to write to it? If not, I would expect you would get a permission denied error.

erik2282 · 09-10-2014, 02:06 PM

I do see the progress bar in notifications area of the kde taskbar, and it shows like 10 minutes left and then after about 30 seconds, the "minutes left" keeps increasing, 15, 30, 52, 2.5hrs, and it just hangs. If it is a permission issue, should it not prompt me for credentials?

jefro · 09-10-2014, 04:46 PM

Can smaller files copy?

frankbell · 09-10-2014, 09:32 PM

Try copying it using the command line.

No guarantees as the copying seems to slow rather than stop, but there's a chance some useful error messages might pop up.

erik2282 · 09-11-2014, 12:21 AM

Thanks for the help guys, I replaced the flash drive with a new Patriot and now its transferring normally. I guess the flash drive went bad or something. Thats a first time I've had a flash drive go bad.. Weird. Anyway, I appreciate all the comments...

cesarbergara · 10-04-2014, 01:23 PM

Hi. Do you see /etc/fstab line for flash?
Time ago i have a problem, because de options (by default) in flash line was 'sync'. Then, flash read-write very slow. Changing 'sync' by 'nosync' solve the problem.
I hope this will hopefull.
Have a nice day.