rewinding a disk drive takes too long

[Randy Bush]

>>> 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

randy