incremental disk wipe?

[rikona]

Hello Rashkae,

Saturday, March 7, 2015, 1:12:30 PM, Rashkae wrote:

> On 15-03-07 03:39 PM, rikona wrote:
>> Again, thanks to all for the helpful suggestions! This might fix
>> the 'problem' - when I tried wiping, OO [and other pgms] would NOT
>> run correctly, or at all, crashing repeatedly. The box was not
>> useable while wiping. How can I get dd [or something else] to run
>> 'nice' as you suggest? Can I set it in htop after it starts, or is
>> it better to start it with the desired nice? One of the pgm
>> complaints seemed to be related to disk access. Does nice also work
>> to control disk access, since this is such a disk-intensive
>> process? Recoll accesses a few large xapian data bases [~90GB], and
>> I use it very often for searches - I need it to work well while
>> wiping. I manually update these Recoll DBs for the same reason - it
>> takes over the box. Would be good to have that be 'nice' too...


> If your programs are crashing while you're trying to wipe a drive,
> you have some other problem that needs addressing. Wiping a drive
> can saturate the IO of an older system, but even if that's the case,
> you should only notice a bit of hesitation here and there, not
> programs crashing and refusing to run. This sounds more like you are
> trying to wipe a drive that has an active swap partition. Though you
> might also be suffering from a faulty i/o chipset, or bad ram.

Hmmm... It was a USB backup disk, no swap, no boot, still being
accessed via USB2. Something re USB access maybe?

The crashing pgm is LO Calc. Happens when trying to change cell
formats during intensive disk use. The pgm doesn't respond [5-10 sec],
then 'darkens' [busy] for a while [10-20 secs] then crashes. Can
recover OK on restart, but does the same thing. This has never
happened other than when intensive disk use, and is quite reproducible
then. Other pgms may be quite slow but don't crash.

I get the same problem when updating the large recoll DBs, which is
also quite disk intensive and takes a while. These files are local,
not USB though. Maybe an LO Calc problem?

What would be useful to check out to learn more?

Again, thanks,

-- 

 rikona