Ok, everything wasn’t all sweetness and light. I went to bed with the rsync going on to the ext2 partition, and a cp -r going on to the VFAT partition. An hour or so later, I was awaked by my cell phone beeping to let me know that the program I have running on my Gradwell account to monitor my web sites was saying that my home box wasn’t serving up web pages.
Sure enough, the box was wedged again. The rsync had completed, but the copy to the VFAT partition seems to have screwed up. So once again I power cycled the poor box (thank goodness for journaled file systems).
I’m not sure what to do now – the VFAT partition isn’t that useful to me if I can’t copy to it without it wedging the box. Maybe I should see if I can format the VFAT portion on Windows.
Could it be that there hardware is broken? Or that somehow it cannot write past a certain sector? I would (after 2 crashes) try a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdwhatever to check…