I''ve hit a very strange problem with MCs VFS handling. I've not yet reported it as a bug, since I'm having some difficulty isolating it, and I'm far from sure how reproducable it will be.
I use Synbak (http://www.initzero.it/products/opensource/synbak/) for backups. For my laptop, I use it to create a gzipped-tar on a USB drive. I've been using it for quite a while with no problems. I've just put a new USB drive in place for backups - the 80 GB one I was using is getting pretty full, so I've put a 250 GB Seagate Momentus into a caddy and I've been using it for a month or so. After redoing the backup config, I was having a look at a recent backup to make sure everything had gone through as it should. A fairly large file - 2.2 GB compressed to around 800 MB archive (mainly due to the bulk of my email). As usual, I was using MC for the task. I attempted to view a text file in the archive. Using F3 did nothing. I then tried to extract the file from the archive to see what might be causing a problem. At which point I got a pop up from MC saying: Cannot read source file "/media/DataTrans/backup/tigger/announce" Input/output error (5) I've tried everything I can think of to isolate the problem. I've used versions of MC ranging from 4.0.7 to 4.7.5.2, with identical results. I've used different versions of tar and gzip. I've tried creating the archive on the laptop's internal hard drive, just to be sure that there isn't some form of file corruption occuring during the transfer to the USB drive. I tried modifiying the 'announce' file (its plain text). I've run checks on the file systems of both the internal drive and the USB drive. None of these things have made any difference - MC will not open or extract the file from the .tar.gz. There are also several others that show the same problem in the archive. Synbak does basic error trapping, so there are no errors being returned from either tar or gzip when the archive is created. To further check, I've manually extracted every file in the archive (which worked without any problems) and compared the extracted files with the originals - no difference. I've also used two archive handling packages - Xarchiver and File Roller, both of which can extract the file, and both of which report no problems with it, or any of the other files in the archive. As things stand, most of the files in my backup work fine with MC, but there are a few (I've not tried every text file in the archive yet) which all exhibit the same problem - MC wil not open them and cannot extract them. I will try creating a smaller archive with some of the problem files and see if that makes any difference, but I'm not sure how else to reproduce it. Any ideas? Anyone else seen a VFS problem of this sort? Paul. _______________________________________________ mc mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
