Why is Documents different?

[banjo]

I did search for this problem before posting, but so many threads contain the word "documents" I could not find the answer. Be gentle.

 

Here is my question.

 

I recently installed Mandy 2008.1 and that went well. The problem occurred when I moved our files from the old computer with Mandy 2006 to the new computer with Mandy 2008.

 

My wife used the Documents folder on the old system, which I had backed up onto an external USB hard drive with a FAT 32. No problem with that.

 

But when I used Konqueror to copy the files from the external USB drive into the new Documents folder, the process locked up so badly I could not kill it. The ps command flagged the process status of "D" (uninterruptible sleep waiting on I/O). I thought it might be a KDE problem so I opened a CLI and did the same copy using the cp command, e.g.

 

cp -R /mnt/drive/home/yada/Documents /home/yada/Documents/

 

Once again, the process locked up so tightly that I could not kill it. Same status, D.

 

I decided to reboot and try again. When I rebooted, Linux froze with the error message that it could not mount the root file system. No boot. It was hung.

 

After a rant, I realized that the USB drive was still plugged into the computer, so I yanked it out. I rebooted the new system again and, yay, it came up. I mounted the disk on the old system, and the old system could see everything normally, so nothing was wrong with the external drive.

 

I renamed the Documents directory on the external drive to "mydocuments' and mounted the drive. Then I copied the files again,

 

cp -R /mnt/drive/home/yada/mydocuments /home/yada/mydocuments/

 

Hooray, the copy went normally. I told my wife not to use Documents any more. And for good measure, don't use Pictures or Music or Videos or any of those other strange directories that reek of fnWindows folders.

 

My question is "What happened?"

 

What is so different about the Documents folder that caused it to lock up my system? When I show the disk in Konqueror the Documents directory has a little green icon on it. What the heck is that? What is going on here?

 

The problem is fixed and my new system is fine, but I am still curious about what is different about the Documents directory.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

My Mandy 2008.1 is cranking on my new core-duo and I'm lovin' it.

 

Linux Rocks!

Banjo

(_)=='=~

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

[ianw1974]

I copied my files to Documents without a problem in Mandriva 2009. I would have normally done though:

 

cp -R /home/ian.old/Documents/* /home/ian/Documents/

 

which is slightly different from the command you wrote for this! Also, make sure that you owned the directory as well, as there could have been a different uid:gid assigned. Eg:

 

chown -R ian:ian /home/ian.old/Documents

 

for example would fix this. Of course, change the path, as I'm only using what I did as an example.

[banjo]

It could be that I just completely bolluxed up the whole copy. The copy that I did using Konqueror got about 20% of the way through the copy before it hung up. So it was not a user uid:gid problem since that would fail right away.

 

The way the FAT disk has worked in the past is that the entire disk looks like it is owned by the user who mounted it because there is no ownership implemented in the FAT system. The Linux file system works out some phony permissions so that it looks right to the Linux OS. So I was theoretically copying files owned by the user who had mounted the disk to the same user.

 

I suppose I could have run into a bad file or something during the first copy and then the second one hung up because I had already hosed the file system with the first copy. I guess I will never know. My wife also has some files with funny file names that makes the FAT system throw errors when I do the backups. Maybe it was one of those files that it choked on.

 

The funny icon on the Documents folder is gone now as well. Sigh. I should keep better records when I run into this stuff.

 

Thanks for the information. The system is working fine, so this was just an information question for me to learn more about the system.

 

BTW, I back up to a FAT disk in case I need to move something to an fnWindows environment in the future. I am beginning to rethink that decision.

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~