I'm trying to make 3 copies of a 40 gig IBM deskstar IDE drive. I've got red hat 7 booted into single user mode, doing the following: cat /dev/hda | count | tee /dev/hdb | tee /dev/hdc > /dev/hdd The copy seems to work fine if I never let the console blank. I copied 2 gigs worth of data (at about 1.5 megabytes/second) by hitting the shift key every few minutes. It never even paused. It also hasn't been having problems copying just hda to hdb. It's adding hdc and hdd into the mix that triggers the hang. I suspect the two IDE controllers are fighting somehow. Unblanking the screen locks it solid semi-reliably, 3 of the 4 times I've let it do that. (Perhaps console blanking/unblanking causes a latency spike? The console unblanks but the red hard drive writing light goes off instantly and the progress display "count" gives you stops moving. The kernel's still there, num-lock changes the keyboard light, but I can't ctrl-c out of the process.) The one time it continued writing after unblanking it hung again a minute or so later, unblocked itself after thirty seconds or so, and then hung again and stayed that way for five minutes until I turned it off. It was not happy. "count" is a ten-line program I wrote to read data from stdin and write it back to stdout with a progress indicator going to stderr. (fprintf(stderr,"%lld bytes\r",bytecount); In a loop. Woo.)) The chipset is sis 5513. The 4 IBM deskstars are ata66 drive with an ata66 cable but the 2.4.3 unconditionally refuses to allow me to switch on DMA on any of them. (hdparm -d1 /dev/hda goes operation not permitted.) I left it off for this test cause I just want to get it to work at the moment. I have tried it with -c1 and without -c1, it hangs either way. Rob (Yes, I'm copying the mounted drive's block device out from under it. It's a bit impolite to the system, but I've done this lots of times. That's why I boot into single user mode and sync beforehand. Yes, the new drive fscks on the way back up, but since nothing's actually changing the data it's fine. This is a seperate issue, even if I was copying hosed data it still shouldn't be hanging.) Update: back to the ide0 only master-to-slave copy. "cat /dev/hda | count > /dev/hdb". It's done 3 gigs so far with no complaints, and I let it blank and unblank twice now and it didn't even pause. Also, the single controller copy is going significantly faster (about twice as fast) even though the two drives still share the same cable. Are the two ide controllers sharing some kind of lock? (The data SHOULD be able to go in paralell, but it doesn't look like it was... I thought the google guys had a patch for that back at ALS...?) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
