Hard drive pauses. Everything else is fine.

Raymond R

Hello,
I searched around the forums, but I did not find anything related to this problem.

When I copy something from the network to my hard drive or from a CD to the hard drive, my whole computer seems to pause for a couple seconds, then it carries on, then it pauses, then it carries on, ad infinitum.

The data does get copied, there is no corruption-there is just the blasted pausing.
Does anyone have an idea of what could cause this?

NOTE: This computer used to run SuSE 8.0 and Windows XP Pro without this problem.
Athlon 1800+; 512MB RAM; 20 GB Hard drive; 40x DVD; Shuttle AK35GT2 MB; KT333 VIA chipset.

...and everything else is fine.

Jimbow · Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2003 6:17 am Post subject:

This could be because of the unmask-interrupt (-u) setting of hdparm:

Raymond R · Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2003 6:43 am Post subject:

I had the latest version of hdparm.
The results of hdparm -u /dev/hda was:
/dev/hda
unmask = 0 (off)

Should I turn it on? (my hard drive controller is not one of the ones listed as having an issue with file corruption)

Thanks for your reply.

Jimbow · Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2003 7:13 am Post subject:

The man page says A setting of 1 permits the driver to unmask other interrupts during processing of a disk interrupt, which greatly improves Linux's responsiveness. It also says that it might bork your filesystem.

Given everything you have said, I think it is very likely that setting -u to one will fix your problem and not bork your file system. On the other hand, if you have a spare partition lying around, this might be an excellent time to perform that backup you've been putting off.
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Raymond R · Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2003 5:39 pm Post subject:

I changed the setting. It appears to have worked.
I am just beginning in my Gentoo setup, so I don't have much to lose.

Thanks again.