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I was copying a bunch of files from one disk to another yesterday and everything went fine for a while. It was a large number of files so I copied them in batches.

The last batch didn't go so well. I ran 'sync' and it took a long time to return. So I checked /var/log/syslog and found a few lines that read "WRITE FPDMA QUEUED". I looked it up and doesn't seem to be good, but I don't quite understand it.

I ran a short test with smartctl and nothing came up.

Today, I decided to run a long test. It doesn't work.

And the short test doesn't work anymore either.

I unmounted and mounted the partition again. Still same error.

I opened the directory where I copied all the files yesterday. SpaceFM shows no content and the status bar says, "0 visible (854 hidden)". I had never seen that happen.

I checked the directory with 'ls' on a terminal. Everything seems to be there. Then I opened it with PCManFM. Everything seems to be there. I even opened some files.

What is going on?

What filesystem type was on the drive you copied FROM?
What filesystem type was on the drive you copied TO?
You verified the drive you were copying TO was mounted before running your command, correct? What was the command, did you use cp with parameters or some other command?

Does that mean running smartctl failed with the error you show? The output shows 'badly formed scsi parameters'. Did you try an online search with that error? I'm not familiar with smartctl so have no suggestions.

With regard to the "WRITE FPDMA QUEUED", an online search turned up a number of sites such as the one below which gives several suggestions.


https://serverfault.com/questions/95...r-running-slow

Is 854 the number of files you expected to copy? When you ran the command ls -a, does the output show the expected files

Is it an external or internal SSD? How is it attached?

A possible issue is that the SATA adapter does not play well with your SSD. Some SATA adapters don't play well with some devices.

From experience, I have a SATA adapter that works well with external hard drives and SSDs and some optical drives, while other optical drives stop responding after 10 to 20 seconds. But those drives work perfectly fine with a different SATA adapter.

Unfortunately, there is no way to know in advance, so all you can do is buy a new adapter and hope it works.

The origin and destiny of the copy were BTRFS file systems.
Yes, both were mounted.
I didn't use cp, I dragged and dropped everything with the SpaceFM file manager.
Both are internal SSDs.

Something good happened. I had three instances of SpaceFM running. I closed all of them, reopened SpaceFM and navigated to the copy target directory. And presto, all the files now seem to be there when I use SpaceFM too.

Something bad happened. I still can't run smartctl -t short on that drive. I did it just a little while after I noticed the error messages in /var/log/syslog. Twice. And now I can't anymore.