Unable to copy large amounts of data (solved, ish)

[daveyw]

A few years ago I bought a 2nd IDE drive for my A1XE. I connected the drive, attempted to copy data from my old drive, but it would only get so far before throwing up this error:

There was an error while accessing this volume:

General Device Failure.
The disk is in an unreadable format.

errorcode = 20
io_Command = 49125
io_Offset = -1084792832
io_Length = 1024
io_Actual = 24

I took the brand new drive back to the store, they ran a diagnostic and said that there was nothing wrong with it. I eventually got it to work with about 95 % reliability by lower the UDMA.

Now I am trying to back up this same hard drive to an external USB drive. I can only copy a few gig at a time before I get the same error:



I plugged the USB drive into a Sam 460, and the same result: it would copy only so much and then throw up the same error. I have tried creating JXFS, SFS. SFS/02 and got a similar error or sometimes just a lock-up. The most I've got through is 11 GB, but sometimes I've had the error with as little as 800 MB.

I don't believe the USB drive is faulty as I have used it on an XP laptop with no problems.

The fact that two different Amigas are giving the same error really makes me wonder - is OS 4 incapable of copying large amounts of data?

[Spectre660]

I just completed a test with no problems.
21.8GB copied from a JXF\04 partition to an external USB 500GB Fat32 drive.
The copy took about 1 hour.
Machine Sam460ex 1.16GHZ. 2GB Ram.
SATA SII3152 Connected internal drive a Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB.
USB external drive a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB.

Some power supplies can cause USB problems on Sam460ex machines.
I have aslo run into problems with a Seagate drive that gives problems with SFS but seems to work ok with fat32.

[Mozzerfan]

@daveyw

I also have no problems on my sam460.

I just copied 11.2 GB to my external usb2 hd (which is an old 160gb seagate drive).
I also successfully use an esata hd docking station to backup my system (my work partition is filled with about 30 GB of data).

All harddisks are formatted with sfs.

[theamigaone]

from that screenshot, ive had that type of error before(lots of them) I started getting them when I bought some 1gb Infineon ram modules which turned out to be not suitable. Those SFS error windows popped up all the time, along with system crashes.

Have you ruled out the possibility of it being faulty ram(memtester/uboot mem test and /or swapping with some other ram etc)

If there was something wrong with AmigaOS drivers you would probably notice the same error with the same values(boundry errors or bit precision etc) but I bet you get different block numbers in the error. It more likely the SFS diskcache contents getting corrupted or internal filesystem buffers.

I use large transfers to usb all the time, mainly reading from NTFS/Fat32 of my TV recordings and movies, thus continuous data streaming without errors.

My machine is AmigaOneXE G4/7455 800mhz 2Gb Micron Ram(previously 512mb Kingston ValueRam) currently with Vcore @ 1.54. A 'Via 4x usb2.0/2x firewire combo' pci card with all 3 Usb Kmods active.

[daveyw]

Have you ruled out the possibility of it being faulty ram(memtester/uboot mem test and /or swapping with some other ram etc)

I haven't ruled it out, but it seems unlikely. I had a different RAM module when I first installed my 2nd HD. Plus I'm getting the error on my A1 and a Sam 460 I borrowed, so it would be unlucky if three different sticks are unsuitable.

Current RAM is a brand new, out of the box Kingston 1 GB, purchased in December.

[theamigaone]

Stating the Ram is brand new means nothing, it still could be incompatible with your XE, I bought my Infineon Ram because everyone on AW said they were the better choice, turns out mine that was exact spec and code but caused hundreds of errors mainly on the SFS and FFS partitions, my Workbench after one of those errors kept disappearing(but really it was still there).

If you havnt done so already, run Memtester

Also have you tried (in the mean time) copying your data via network. 100Mb network is around 12meg a sec(excluding overhead) back it up to a samba share on Windows if needed. Although use an archiver for important system directories to maintain the protection bits.

Even AmigaExplorer just about works reliably who can to cross network HD cloning AmigaOS -> HDF, thou can bee slower

[nbache]

Also have you tried (in the mean time) copying your data via network. 100Mb network is around 12meg a sec(excluding overhead) back it up to a samba share on Windows if needed.

Nah, you really don want to do that. With our current SMBFileSystem, writing to an SMB share is slower than watching moss grow, regardless of the speed of the underlying network. Try AmigaNetFS (if you have another networked Amiga) or FTP or something instead.

Best regards,

Niels

[theamigaone]

Yes, lol true just tried it, didnt quite realise it was that slow.

[daveyw]

If you havnt done so already, run Memtester

I ran Memtester last night on both the Sam and the A1.

On the Sam it appeared to lock-up after allocating memory. I'm currently running mtest.

On the A1, it ran OK, then seemed to throw up yellow alerts with screen glitches. I left it running for 24 hours, this is as far as it got before I did a reset:



Doesn't look good, will try running mtest tonight.

I actually tried FTP from the A1 to the Sam and found a) it was very slow and b) the data being written to the USB drive was somehow being corrupted, then c) I got the same lock-up on the Sam as I did on the A1.

[kas1e]

@davew

On the Sam it appeared to lock-up after allocating memory. I'm currently running mtest.

Do you have enabled swap partition ? Lockup can be because of bug in swapper which we have since some time.