*BSD News Article 3005


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From: cflatter@nrao.edu (Chris Flatters)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: extract ran for 7+ hours: HELP!!
Message-ID: <1992Aug3.173550.10601@nrao.edu>
Date: 3 Aug 92 17:35:50 GMT
References: <1992Aug3.152704.23230@cc.ic.ac.uk>
Sender: news@nrao.edu
Reply-To: cflatter@nrao.edu
Organization: NRAO
Lines: 30

In article 23230@cc.ic.ac.uk, eshc@elijah.ee.ic.ac.uk (Eric Cheung) writes:
>Subject line says all.  I booted from Tiny, install to 90M partition of HD,
>reboot from HD, loadfd from floppies, and 'extract'.  It went on checking the
>files, then reporting some files are already present (I assume this is normal),
>then went on happily for the next 7+ hours.  During this time, the HD is used
>almost continuously.
>
>I had to abort when I woke up in the morning and find it still at it.
>
>My box: Elonex LT-320X (laptop).  Intel 386SX-20/Cyrix387 with cache.  ISA.
>	640K RAM + 1M extended (It is advertised as 2M but the 364K between
>	640 and 1M cannot be configured as extended).  IDE 120M HD.  VGA
>
>I suspect either or both of the following:
>
>1)	Not enough RAM so the extract process is swapping like mad.  Hence
>	continuous disk use.  (Does cpio use a lot of memory?)
>
>2)	My machine cannot run 386BSD
>
>So, any advise/suggestion most welcome.  Fingers crossed (2) is not the case.
>386BSD is such an exciting thing!

It's 1.  I had this problem until the extra SIMM's for my CompuAdd system
arrived (but I didn't have the patience to wait seven hours).  Uncompress
(the cpio archive is compressed) has a habit of taking infinite time if it
runs out of memory.

	Chris Flatters
	cflatter@nrao.edu