rewinding a disk drive takes too long

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <E1Ahyej-0000OI-5l at psg.com>, Randy Bush writes:
>>>> How active was the file system that was being read by (r)dump?
>>> not at all.  it was a laptop with nothing active on it
>>> except for the dump.
>> OK; fair enough -- but I couldn't tell from your note, and "active file
>> system" has been a plausible culprit in most such cases I've seen so
>> far.
>>> it did have X and gnome up.  but it has 1gb ram, so should
>>> not have been swapping or anything.
>> :-)
>
>btw, what i forgot to say was
>  o source system is current as of yesterday
>  o dest system is stable as of today
>  o until the last upgrade to the stable dest, dump would never
>    complete!  it always got to the same point, 86%, and then hung

This is actually a pretty normal thing, dump is not very good at
predicting the size of a dump if the filesystem is live (and I
belive in a few other circumstances as well)

Largest number I've seen recently was -250% :-)


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.