Copying to a USB drive - no progress but file is there

[Tyrannocaster]

Until today I have been able to use all my usb drives with Linux Lite and had no problems, but today I tried to copy a 225 meg file to a new Kingston 16 gig drive and nothing appeared to happen; the progress bar stayed at the beginning with no change until after several minutes I finally got tired of sitting there and ejected the drive. When I tried putting it in my Windows PC it asked me if I wanted to scan it to fix it, so I reformatted it. Then I tried the same thing again with the same result.

This time, rather than scanning or reformatting it, I just looked at the contents on the PC and the copied file appears to be there. This behavior should not be happening, obviously. It seems like the window manager is freezing, I guess, but I don't really know enough about Linux to say that authoritatively. In this case, I have installed (and am using) PCManFM, which I prefer to Thunar. When I tried looking at the USB drive with a different window no files showed up while this was happening.

Any ideas on this? Funny, how for a new Linux user, everything is mysterious. :-)

UPDATE: I tried with a different USB drive and the same thing happened. I used a different file to copy, too. It just sits there and says "File operation is in progress..." with no progress shown in the bar at all.

[bitsnpcs]

Hello Tyrannocaster,

can you reboot and then try again.

I remember trying a variety of things when I had this issue once and this was what solved it in the end.
I have not had the problem since or needed to reboot due to it.

Some of what I had read at the time said it could be mounting issues like not unmounting and ejecting (which was not what I'd done), or that files were still transferring when I unmounted ejected, this could be the case.

The other one I read was about the trash on the usb stick, it said it can occur in Nautilus (and also in Dolphin) if the trash can has files moved to trash that are not deleted, and to hold down the Ctrl key and press h to show the hidden files in the trash can of usb stick and delete them before unmounting or ejecting.
I have since then removed usb sticks and not emptied the trash can 1 time, (yesterday) and the error didn't reoccur, so I am unsure if that was the cause the previous time and if it can be an intermittent or random error/cause, not happening every time, or if it was unrelated to the cause.

[Tyrannocaster]

Yes, I wondered about rebooting, too. I did, and then copied the file again; this time the progress bar immediately showed 100% but it still says "File operation in progress" with the window open several minutes later. Ah, it just now disappeared; I didn't time it, but it was a long time. I didn't have this issue at all for the first several days I used this OS, and I copied a lot of files via USB - mp3s, videos, and photos, all with none of this.

I'd like to fix this, because the whole idea of using the USB drive is for quick transfer of files, and this is anything but quick.

Thanks for the quick reply.

[bitsnpcs]

Glad it helped as a temporary measure.
Hopefully someone has a fix for this.

[member=47]Scott[/member] and [member=16]gold_finger[/member] helped me sort an issue on a portable hard drive where it was taking very long times, it has worked perfectly ever since.

I am unsure if this is suitable for USB sticks though, can anyone confirm either way ?

Here is the link - https://www.freecinema2022.gq/forums/hard-.../#msg32914
On the link it was #2 Option that worked on the portable drive.

[Tyrannocaster]

To see if it was an issue with the window manager, I copied the file again using Double Commander. The same thing happened that I got last time - the copy was very quick according to the progress bar, but the progress window never closed, although the destination pane of Double Commander showed the file there. I finally closed the progress window manually. This seems very odd.

So then I copied it using a terminal. The file appeared immediately in the destination folder, but the terminal didn't "come back" to me for almost two minutes. Does it really take two minutes to transfer 225 megs? And if so, why is the progress bar suddenly so misleading?

[bitsnpcs]

Google says 40MB/s is the fastest actual rate (not theoretical rates) for USB 2.
Unsure of USB 3 it is meant to be faster.
Based on that alone, less than 6 seconds would be normal for 225MB.

[Tyrannocaster]

This computer has only USB 2.0 ports. On my Windows PC with USB 2.0 I get anywhere from a low of a few megs a second (3 or 4) to almost 20, seemingly based on the phase of the moon. :-) If I were getting 2 megs/s here, it should take about 110 seconds, or almost two minutes, but that is an awfully slow transfer rate.

The really confounding thing here is the progress bar, which seems to be stuck at one end or the other, with nothing in between.

[supergamer]

If you still have thunar installed can you please try a test with that and what I am suspecting has been an issue since 2006.

[bitsnpcs]

If the Ram or cpu is being used heavily for the transfer due to some issue it might make the progress bar not work in real time ?

[supergamer]

I ran into this issue when I created a faster version of Vectorlinux called Velocity. I used Fluxbox and PCManFM. I discovered way back then that dbus and PCManFM didn't cooperate as smoothly as Thunar. Copying smaller files worked just fine until you got to something around 20mb in size then you started seeing what your experiencing now. I have not dabbled into that realm again as there was to many issues with Fluxbox that I didn't like, like having to use icons to open and eject usb drives and not mounting things correctly. I wish I could give you more answers but sometimes things do not get fixed. I hope it is just a config file in PCManFM to allow the polling of mounted volumes.