copying data from external disk freezes with errors and halts system

[dave]

Hello,
    I've got a 5.4-RELEASE box with a usb2 connected hard disk. On this disk
which is formatted ext2fs is about 8 gigs of data i want to copy over. I
mount the disk readonly and issue
cp -R
well around the 1.2g mark i start getting
cmd_errors cp -R
in /var/log/messages and i have to kill the process. The specific command
is:
cd /mnt
cp -R * /backup/data
I then try it with tar
tar -cf - | (cd /backup/data; tar -xf -)
This gets up to about 5.4g then the errors start again. I thought about dump
but am not sure if that can read ext2 filesystems.
Thanks.
Dave.