Slow access to USB hard drive

[rafaelorta]

Hi all,

After more than a bit of a struggle, I managed to hook up my Western Digital Media Centre (250 Gb external USB hard drive) to a Knoppix 3.9 boot-up in a desperate attempt to rescue my data from a crashed WinXP installation.

I can see the internal hard drive and all the data, I also mounted the external hard drive and gained RW access to it.

I started to transfer the data (~22 Gb), which is happening, but at the current rate I think it will take about a month to finish! (The file copy message generally says "Stalled" in the transfer rate section)

Any pointers to how to improve the transfer speed and my chances of ending-up before the year ends?

Thanks in advance,

Rafael

[rwcitek]

I started to transfer the data (~22 Gb), which is happening, but at the current rate I think it will take about a month to finish! (The file copy message generally says "Stalled" in the transfer rate section)

Any pointers to how to improve the transfer speed and my chances of ending-up before the year ends?

Sounds like your drive is using USB1.1 drivers instead of the USB2.0 drivers.

You have three options:
1) figure out how to get your device to use the USB2.0 drivers
2) switch to FireWire (ieee1394)
3) do the transfer over the network

Personally, I've had much better luck with FireWire than USB, but YMMV.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org

[d00m3d]

Sounds like it is a problem of the ub support in Knoppix 3.9 kernel. The ub support is known to cause slow data transfer rate. It is lucky that newer version of Knoppix, i.e. 4.0+, already removed this nasty bitch. See http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20466

There are another two options:

1. use a newer version of Knoppix to do your task
2. use other LiveCD (such as Kanotix or SystemRescueCD) that don't have the ub support in kernel to recover your data

[ewangr]

Sounds like it is a problem of the ub support in Knoppix 3.9 kernel. The ub support is known to cause slow data transfer rate. It is lucky that newer version of Knoppix, i.e. 4.0+, already removed this nasty bitch.

No, actually they haven't. In fact, I'm currently trying to find a way to build a custom kernel to remove this problem from an install I did with the 4.0 DVD.

Now, if there's a cheatcode I missed that turns this off, I'd love to be proven wrong (would save me quite a bit of time).