SD *seems* to hang while copying to external disk

[NotoriousBIC]

I'm trying to create a bootable clone on a LaCie firewire disk and I'm running into a bit of trouble.

Everything starts out normal, but eventually SuperDuper stays in the same place for hours. It remains responsive and I'm able to stop the copying process, so a 'hang' is perhaps not correctly worded.


This a pic of my third attempt at this, which is still at the same spot after 3 hours. Something I've noticed is that it stops at more or less the same spot, but not exactly.

Steps I've undertaken:
- Checked for any large files on source disk (none present THAT large)
- Repaired Disk Permissions
- Verified all Disks (no problems found)
- Updated SD (latest auto-update)
- Partitioned the firewire disk with a smaller partition

System info:
XServe RAID
Mac OS X Server 10.4.6
Source Disk: RAID Mirror set, 2 x 180 IBM
File System: HFS+
Destination Disk: LaCie External Firewire 500 GB

I must confess that I'm not too familiar with Mac OS, so forgive me if I made an obvious mistake.
Thank you very much in advance for any help you can offer.

[dnanian]

The thing to do, when it gets to this "hang" (which is usually because it's copying a large file, or one that's being actively updated and thus looks *huge*), is to run:

sudo lsof | grep SDCopy

This will give a list of the files we're reading and writing, and the last two lines are the file we're operating on right now. That should help you (and us) figure out exactly what's going on.

[NotoriousBIC]

Thank you very much for the help!

I narrowed it down to a service constantly crashing and writing an increasingly large logfile.

[dnanian]

Perfect: there you go. Glad you located the problem.

[NotoriousBIC]

Just thought of a simple suggestion to help us 'mere mortals'.
Is it possible to indicate the file SuperDuper is copying in the UI? That should help speed up the troubleshooting process a bit.

[dnanian]

Anything's possible, of course!

At present, though, we can't do it. In the future... perhaps. We'll see what we can do.