transfer hangs with usb disk enclosure

RoundsToZero · Guru Joined: 17 Nov 2003 Posts: 478 Location: New York, NY

I have a USB disk enclosure that supports USB 2.0 High Speed. In it is a 60 GB hard drive. It has one partition with the ext2 filesystem.

I am trying to copy my CPAN and distfiles mirrors (about 33 GB total) off my main hard drive onto the enclosure. After a few minutes, however, the transfer completely locks up. I can switch to another vc and continue to work normally, but I can't kill or kill -KILL the cp process the transfer is using. The only way to access the drive again is to reboot; even unloading all the USB modules and loading them again doesn't help.

The problem seems like the transfer is happening so quickly that some place along the line can't keep up. It seems like I can make it last longer before it stalls by forcing the transfer to go slower by using the -v option to cp in order to print out everything as it happens. But it still freezes up in less than a minute.

When I reboot, I sometimes find that I can't erase all the contents of the enclosure, I get an Input/Output error. The only thing I've found that works to clean up after one of the transfer stalls is to reformat the disk.

Would trying another filesystem help?

Any other advice is appriciated.

shade266 · Guru Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Internal

why not make 3 or more partitions and setup gentoo on it with a different kernel or the same kernel if youd like. in BIOS you can boot from the usb device and work inside a fully fuctioning gentoo system. but if that isn't for you then i would suggest you first check your kernel to ensure you have hardware specific modules selected for the device and then i would choose a different fs. maybe reiser.
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RoundsToZero · Guru Joined: 17 Nov 2003 Posts: 478 Location: New York, NY

I've got something that seems to be working so far.

I wrote a little script that runs "sync" every 10 seconds. I think the problem might be that some buffer is filling up too fast and the kernel never writes out to the disk. Then eventually, for some reaosn, it hangs. In fact, the activity light on the enclosure is rarely active unless sync is running.

So I don't know. I'll see how it goes

shade266 · Guru Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Internal

good deal! let us know how it turns out and possibly post the script on here to help others get the workaround as well. it sounds like a good idea.
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RoundsToZero · Guru Joined: 17 Nov 2003 Posts: 478 Location: New York, NY

It went a bit longer than normal, but eventually still had the same problem.

I'm going to look into more useful methods of debugging. This is just the script in case it helps anyone.

f.kater · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 342 Location: Berlin

Hi RoundsToZero,

same problem here. Haven't missed any kernel since 2.6.x, writing big data still fails.

This kind of "buffer overflow" may have a relation to the kernel message at boot up when the drive is connected: Something like "sda drive cache: assuming write though".

My workaround is deactivating the EHCI 2.0 module in the kernel and just use USB 1.

Hope you find a better solution. I'll be watiching this thread!

Felix

dan2003 · Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 10:46 am Post subject:

Hi, did this get solved? I have what i think is probably a related problem.

First off, What i have is a usb2-ide converter which allows me to attach any 3.5 or 2.5 inch ide drive to a usb enabled pc. It has its own PSU to power the drive also.

On my A7N8X machine this works fine and i have used it to transfer 10s of gigs of a friends wedding videos in DV format with no trouble wotsoever.

However on my laptop which only has USB1.1 built in i use a PC-Card USB2 adaptor. If i plug the drive in to this with ehci-hcd unloaded it all works fine at the slower usb1 speed. However with ehci-hcd loaded mount just hangs and never actually mounts the drive! I have tried everything i can think of including the bandwidth option in the kernel but cannot get this to work.

Has anybody any ideas?

Kernels on both my machines are 2.6.9-nitro2, i have also now tried 2.6.9-nitro4 on the laptop but i dont think usb is effected at all in the updates.

f.kater · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 342 Location: Berlin

Hi,
I have switched from development-sources-2.6.9 to 2.6.10 and copied 15 GB of data from two different terminals to the usb drive. No problems! Singing ya ya yipiee yipie yeaaaaah!

I'll post here again in case of errors.

gurky · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 14

I have had this problem or a similar one with both a pendrive
and an external USB drive.
I've got USB1.
It seems to me that indeed it's a matter of buffering or caching.
What I noticed is that even if everything seems to hang, it's not.
If I wait long enough, even a minute or longer, the write/sync ends
and everything is completed correctly.
I copied a few GBs and for a lot of time the system seems to be
doing nothing, it hangs and restarts, hangs and restarts.
Every time it resumes it seems to be transferring data
at a speed far above USB1 capabilities.
Did you try to mount with the sync option? Maybe it's a bit too much... but it should work.

TheCoop · Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2005 2:19 pm Post subject:

ive got USB2 enclosure that sometimes freezes when throwing lots of data at it. Its got a light round the outside that flickers when its being accessed. When it freezes, the light goes off completely for a minute, then comes back on, then about 30s later data transfer starts normally again when it stopped, no problems.
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