Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 01:53:39 Peter Humphrey wrote: I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. Not unheard of. If you have too small/large bs and the disk is relatively large it will take quite some hours to get it transfered bit by bit. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
Peter Humphrey wrote: On Saturday 30 July 2011 15:50:11 Dale wrote: Peter Humphrey wrote: One thing's certain: it's a good test of the USB disk! I just hope your power incident doesn't happen to me too. :-) That would suck. I sure did hate to lose my videos. I bet ATT does to since I have to go find them and download them again. :/ I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. All I have to do now is to persuade Win-XP to find the disk. No luck so far... I'm glad you wasn't in a hurry. lol Dale :-) :-)
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
Mick wrote: On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 01:53:39 Peter Humphrey wrote: I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. Not unheard of. If you have too small/large bs and the disk is relatively large it will take quite some hours to get it transfered bit by bit. How do you know what size bs to use? I didn't specify one when I did mine. Is there a auto option maybe? Just curious. Dale :-) :-)
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 09:49:33 Dale wrote: Mick wrote: On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 01:53:39 Peter Humphrey wrote: I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. Not unheard of. If you have too small/large bs and the disk is relatively large it will take quite some hours to get it transfered bit by bit. How do you know what size bs to use? I didn't specify one when I did mine. Is there a auto option maybe? Just curious. Sorry I was thinking of using dd to move/clone a partition, which allows you to set bs. Not sure how parted does it - it could potentially default to bs=512 for all but the latest large disks, which would make things slower I guess. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Saturday 30 July 2011 15:50:11 Dale wrote: Peter Humphrey wrote: One thing's certain: it's a good test of the USB disk! I just hope your power incident doesn't happen to me too. :-) That would suck. I sure did hate to lose my videos. I bet ATT does to since I have to go find them and download them again. :/ I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. All I have to do now is to persuade Win-XP to find the disk. No luck so far... -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23 Ouch... that's a case of a read-write-verify with small blocks over USB showing just how slow USB really is, I think. Parted does things the safest way it can, and verifies things every step of the way, and I've even had it take several hours to transition a third or so as much data on an internal sata disk. Add in the limitations on speed of a USB bus and... well, 23hrs sounds about right to me... -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:13 AM, Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 09:49:33 Dale wrote: Mick wrote: On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 01:53:39 Peter Humphrey wrote: I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. Not unheard of. If you have too small/large bs and the disk is relatively large it will take quite some hours to get it transfered bit by bit. How do you know what size bs to use? I didn't specify one when I did mine. Is there a auto option maybe? Just curious. Sorry I was thinking of using dd to move/clone a partition, which allows you to set bs. Not sure how parted does it - it could potentially default to bs=512 for all but the latest large disks, which would make things slower I guess. -- Regards, Mick Well, GParted, if I recall, does a couple checks to guess 'best' block size when cloning or moving a partition, but I'm really not sure how it does things when shrinking and shifting it sideways to a spot that overlaps with where it started... but based on the above, I would guess it really does do a bs of 512, or ar best, the cluster size of the file system it is moving (usually 4k), since it's moving the data stored there, not the whole partition, block for block. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sunday 31 July 2011 14:15:20 Joshua Murphy wrote: Well, GParted, if I recall, does a couple checks to guess 'best' block size when cloning or moving a partition, but I'm really not sure how it does things when shrinking and shifting it sideways to a spot that overlaps with where it started... but based on the above, I would guess it really does do a bs of 512, or ar best, the cluster size of the file system it is moving (usually 4k), since it's moving the data stored there, not the whole partition, block for block. In fact it did run those tests, and it settled on a value of, I think, 16MB blocks. It then ran a read-only test of the entire file system, and only then started copying it. As it was moving the partition upwards by about half its occupied size, there was considerable overlap. That must mean that it started with the highest-numbered block and worked steadily (very!) downwards. I don't know where in the partition it ran its speed tests, but on a partition that occupies almost all the physical disk, as it did, there must be a considerable speed difference between its two ends. -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Sunday 31 July 2011 14:15:20 Joshua Murphy wrote: Well, GParted, if I recall, does a couple checks to guess 'best' block size when cloning or moving a partition, but I'm really not sure how it does things when shrinking and shifting it sideways to a spot that overlaps with where it started... but based on the above, I would guess it really does do a bs of 512, or ar best, the cluster size of the file system it is moving (usually 4k), since it's moving the data stored there, not the whole partition, block for block. In fact it did run those tests, and it settled on a value of, I think, 16MB blocks. It then ran a read-only test of the entire file system, and only then started copying it. As it was moving the partition upwards by about half its occupied size, there was considerable overlap. That must mean that it started with the highest-numbered block and worked steadily (very!) downwards. I don't know where in the partition it ran its speed tests, but on a partition that occupies almost all the physical disk, as it did, there must be a considerable speed difference between its two ends. -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23 There probably is a fair chunk of difference in maximum speed the disk can work at on each end (I've even seen around a 20MB/s difference on several 160GB drives I've dealt with), but outside of some older drives that've been heavily abused in their lives, I'm not sure I've seen a sata drive that I've used my usual drive test (MHDD on a Hiren's bootable USB) on register below around 60MB/s on the slow end, and USB2's *theoretical* limit is 480Mb/s (60MB/s) ... real-world implementations rarely reach, let alone top, around 40MB/s, so disk speed variation across the disk is an unlikely source of the slowdown. More likely, it's the fact that parted has to start from the end, and work its way backwards, reading, writing, and verifying in separate rotations of the disk with no benefit from the drive's ability to stream a larger block into cache, since the whole process is backwards compared to the streaming read most drives are optimized for. Of course, this is all off the cuff conjecture on my part, including my assumptions about how parted approaches the whole task... mixed with a bit of anecdotal evidence on my end... but, makes for amusing conversation and contemplation, if nothing more substantial. I will point out that the newer advanced format WD 500GB blue's I've worked recently with pulled a consistent 120-110MB/s speed from end to end... when their older 320s usually peaked at around 85 or so. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sunday 31 July 2011 15:17:16 Joshua Murphy wrote: There probably is a fair chunk of difference in maximum speed the disk can work at on each end (I've even seen around a 20MB/s difference on several 160GB drives I've dealt with), but outside of some older drives that've been heavily abused in their lives, I'm not sure I've seen a sata drive that I've used my usual drive test (MHDD on a Hiren's bootable USB) on register below around 60MB/s on the slow end, and USB2's *theoretical* limit is 480Mb/s (60MB/s) ... real-world implementations rarely reach, let alone top, around 40MB/s, so disk speed variation across the disk is an unlikely source of the slowdown. Sounds entirely reasonable, and I wasn't really trying to blame the slowness on that variation - just mentioning it in passing. More likely, it's the fact that parted has to start from the end, and work its way backwards, reading, writing, and verifying in separate rotations of the disk with no benefit from the drive's ability to stream a larger block into cache, since the whole process is backwards compared to the streaming read most drives are optimized for. Perhaps I'm naive here, but I should have thought an intelligent disk copying algorithm would be able to account for that, at least in part. Maybe that's why it ran the speed tests at the beginning. Of course, this is all off the cuff conjecture on my part, including my assumptions about how parted approaches the whole task... mixed with a bit of anecdotal evidence on my end... but, makes for amusing conversation and contemplation, if nothing more substantial. Indeed. I will point out that the newer advanced format WD 500GB blue's I've worked recently with pulled a consistent 120-110MB/s speed from end to end... when their older 320s usually peaked at around 85 or so. Well, I haven't run any proper tests, but watching gkrellm during an occasional large transfer I don't remember seeing more than half that lower figure. These are two Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB disks in md-raid with LVM-2, and I haven't fiddled with any of their settings. -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sunday 31 Jul 2011 01:53:39 Peter Humphrey wrote: All I have to do now is to persuade Win-XP to find the disk. No luck so far... I don't know what's your partition topology, but you may want to use: fixboot (to rewrite the partition boot record on the WinXP partition) fixmbr (to rewrite the MBR boot code on the disk MBR) with a MSWindows CD. If the partition of the WinXP installation is intact then the position of the partition on the disk may be causing you trouble, in which case play around with the GRUB hide and chainload options to hide other disks/partitions, so that WinXP thinks it is the first partition on the first disk. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Sunday 31 July 2011 18:20:02 Mick wrote: If the partition of the WinXP installation is intact then the position of the partition on the disk may be causing you trouble, in which case play around with the GRUB hide and chainload options to hide other disks/partitions, so that WinXP thinks it is the first partition on the first disk. In fact it is so, by design. I don't know what I did, but after enough reboots Win-XP was happy. Thanks anyway. -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
Peter Humphrey wrote: In fact it is so, by design. I don't know what I did, but after enough reboots Win-XP was happy. Thanks anyway. That sounds like winders. lol Dale :-) :-)
OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Saturday 30 July 2011 00:06:57 Dale wrote: I'm just curious as to how much longer dd is going to take. I wish it has some sort of a progress bar or something. :/ I'm in a similar process. I have an external disk which I use to back my boxes up. I need a bootable vfat partition for the Win-XP part of my laptop, but what I'd set up was far too small. So I was faced with either losing all my Linux backups, or shrinking the ext4 partition to make more space for vfat. Gparted is currently moving all the ext4 data up the disk. The partition is now 731 GB with 369 GB occupied. I started it nearly 18 hours ago and it still says it has 5h 40m to go. It may want to do some other housekeeping after the copy too. It says it's copying 731 GB, but that must be an error, since nowhere on the disk (and nothing on the network, come to that) is large enough to receive that much data. One thing's certain: it's a good test of the USB disk! I just hope your power incident doesn't happen to me too. :-) -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
Peter Humphrey wrote: One thing's certain: it's a good test of the USB disk! I just hope your power incident doesn't happen to me too. :-) That would suck. I sure did hate to lose my videos. I bet ATT does to since I have to go find them and download them again. :/ Dale :-) :-)
Re: OT: Re: [gentoo-user] X Freezes With Firefox on Many Post 2.6.38 Kernels
On Saturday 30 July 2011 15:50:11 Dale wrote: Peter Humphrey wrote: One thing's certain: it's a good test of the USB disk! I just hope your power incident doesn't happen to me too. :-) That would suck. I sure did hate to lose my videos. I bet ATT does to since I have to go find them and download them again. :/ I hope you're pleased to know the process finished. 23 hours to move a partition! Never heard anything like it. All I have to do now is to persuade Win-XP to find the disk. No luck so far... -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
