SDCopy not responding?

[GregLink]

I've just upgraded to 2.1, at the same time I upgraded to 10.4.6 (I know, bad idea). I attempted to do a full backup (copy new files only) from one HD to another partition (identically sized) on the same HD. It seems to run fine for a while, and so I go on my merry way.

I come back later to find that my entire machine is irresponsive (mouse moved SBOD, but no apps responded, including finder/windowserver), so I have to hard reboot. It comes back fine, no problem. So I restart SD, and attempt to do the same thing again. Again, it seems to start fine, but after a while, I hit Activity monitor to see that

SDCopy Not Responding (owned by root, using ~5% of a 2Ghz G5, and taking about 32MB of memory)

SDAgent seems to be working fine, and takes almost no space or CPU.

Any thoughts on if this is SD's fault, or a 10.4.6 issue? I'm not ready to blame anyone yet, but am more than willing to help debug.

[dnanian]

Activity Monitor indicating SDCopy isn't responding isn't unusual, since it's faceless and doesn't run its main loop very often, especially while copying.

I'd suggest opening Terminal during the copy and running:

sudo lsof | grep SDCopy

That'll indicate what we're copying at any given time, so you can see what's going on.

The system being unresponsive, though, is likely due to some low-level issue such as a kernel extension or I/O subsystem having serious issues... is your external drive the only thing on the FireWire bus (if FireWire)?