Hi,

I'm using Knoppix 5.1.1 on a medion laptop w/2GB ram, 160 GB HDD and have been backing up to an external Maxtor OneTouch Plus 4. I boot knoppix with the cheat code "laptop" and that's all. I first used firewire, then usb. Initially, I could dd my whole 160 gb in about 2 hours. But the last time it seems to be taking about 50 times as long. It hasn't finished yet. I started this backup about 17:00 and here at almost 22:00, the file is only about 18,901M. I use the same command to backup it up:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/location/of/extHDD/filename.img bs=8192.

The source point is NOT mounted, the target is.

The only thing I can think of is that over the weekend, I installed Solaris Express (using the whole hdd), and then restored it from the earlier (fast) backup. Could Solaris have done something weird to the hard drive in the laptop? Or has the Maxtor taken a nose dive? (It's barely two weeks old). This Maxtor was a replacement to the first one I got. The firewire connection on the first one died. This really doesn't make sense. Any ideas? Thanks.

Terry

Have you checked if DMA is enabled? As root:and look for UDMA:What about hdparm for your source?

I won't tell you about dd, but you can check some things here.

Is your byte size of 8192 correct?

There are several things.

I didn't check dma this particular boot of knoppix, however, it was always enabled before without me having to specify it on the boot line.

However, hdparm -i /dev/sda returns some error. I forget which. So that makes me think the ext drive is bad in some way. But hdparm also returns an error with my laptop's hdd. I don't recall it doing that before. I got the 8192 from checking what hdparm said (before the errors). 8192 was the biggest I could use for both drives. Anyway, now I can't even recheck that.

As I said, it worked fine last week. Only took 2 hours to do 160 GB.

Thanks,
Terry

I didn't check dma this particular boot of knoppix, however, it was always enabled before without me having to specify it on the boot line.

However, hdparm -i /dev/sda returns some error. I forget which. So that makes me think the ext drive is bad in some way. But hdparm also returns an error with my laptop's hdd. I don't recall it doing that before. I got the 8192 from checking what hdparm said (before the errors). 8192 was the biggest I could use for both drives. Anyway, now I can't even recheck that.

As I said, it worked fine last week. Only took 2 hours to do 160 GB.

I hooked the ext drive to another cpu (a desktop) and started a file copy with Midnight Commander. The file is 117 GB. It started out copying about 16-17 MB/second. A couple of hours later, I returned to check it, and it was down to 1.46 MB/sec. Later, I returned to check, and it was down to 1 MB/second, so I canceled it.

Thanks,
Terry

Terry,

I'd get the manufacturer's utility and check those drives.

The hard drive manufacturers utility. Why couldn't I think of something simple like that? It's not like I didn't know they existed. Thanks.

Terry

Smells like a harddrive failure. I am not sure how Linux deals with this, but I have seen Windows gradually degrading transfer mode as I/O errors are detected (udma5 udma4 ... pio).