On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 13:49 +0530, Priyadarsan Roy wrote: [...] > I have an external HDD connected via USB and a 1 GB pen drive most of > the time to my system. I have copied data to and fro in the ranges of > 4GB and above. Once in a while I have seen the machine getting stuck. > One work around I have found is after copying large data, before I > eject I run "sync" from the command line. This command might take some > time to finish. You can see the Pen Dirve LED blinking fast at this > time. After this if I eject my Laptop never used to Hang. [...]
Copying 4GB of data to a USB disk will take a long time, even with USB 2.0, and the actual transfer will almost certainly be cached. When you go to eject the drive, the transfer becomes forced, and the immediate copying of large amounts of data takes over your system. So, I suspect that the system is not really hanging, but only unresponsive. You can check this by running 'top' in a terminal window before the eject, and you should see 'cp' starting to take up a lot of system resources on ejecting the USB disk. If you see the list of processes in 'top' updating, that is also a sign that the system is not hung. When you use 'sync' as mentioned above, that forces the system to actually transfer any pending files. So, in effect you are doing what the system does automatically when you do an eject without syncing. Regards, Gora -- ubuntu-in mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-in
