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wanderingidea

Member

From: The Hague, The Netherlands

Registered: 2004-12-24

Posts: 26

Website

Copy between two usb harddisks fails

Interesting (?) problem:

I have two external usb 2.0 harddisks of 80 Gb each with an ext3 filesystem on it.
They are used as exact copies of each other so from time to time I want to copy the data from one harddisk to the other.

That is where the problem is.

As long as I copy say 1 Gb data everything goes ok.
But the harddisks contain more than 10 Gb data and somewhere during copying the copy itself hangs.
The same result occurs everytime when I use cp or rsync or whatever.
After the copy hangs the harddisks are still mounted but I do not see anything under the mount points.
I mount the harddisks with the '-o=sync' option.

When I do the same under Win'XP (with an ext2 filesystem driver) the copy is without any problems. Clearly I do not want to use XP. 

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this? Is there some magical other option I have to use when mounting them?

Kern

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2005-02-09

Posts: 464

Re: Copy between two usb harddisks fails

have you thought of using dd to make an exact bitwise copy from source to target?

You might want to zero the target drive first, to ensure no data hangover.

you dont mount the drives for this operation.

but be very sure which drive is source and which is target.