This is actually a long-standing kernel problem. What you are seeing is that the kernel is retrying too many times in the face of I/O errors. For most (although admittedly not all) write errors, by the time the disk as returned an error, it has retried it a few times. Depending on the device driver and storage stack, there are multiple retries happening at different levels. This slows down the error handling significantly. You didn't say what kind of hard drive you had (IDE/SCSI/SATA), but given that you mentioned that ^C didn't respond right away, I'm guessing it's an IDE/ATAPI hard drive with programmed I/O (i.e. non-DMA enabled).
In any case, this is very much a kernel issue, and not an e2fsprogs problem. -- e2fsck / linux kernel chokes on I/O errors https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/64914 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
