I have this problem too. HP Pavilion (Core 2 Quad, 3 GB RAM,
2.6.31-17-generic x86_64)
I was unable to use dd to write a memstick image to a Sandisk USB stick.
It was crawling to a virtual stop before reaching 40% complete. I hope
my observations will help to solve this problem.
My first
I have the same issue, except the fact with mine is that I freed more
than 4 gigs of space by deleting some stuff and removing a ton of
sofware with synaptic and apt-get, checked it with df -h, only to
reboot and find that my computer had somehow reclaimed that space and my
root partition returned
