Copying and taring large amounts of data

[Scott Henson <shenson2@wvu.edu>]

I need to move large amounts of data from one disk to another and then
tar it up for back up purposes.  I have tried cp and mv, but both take
very large amounts of time with many ide resets and faults.  The amount
of data I am trying to copy is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15
gigs.  It is going from a fat32 fs to an ext2 fs.  I also notice that
when I use cp,  my system grinds to a halt and the cp comand doesnt do
much.  From what I am guessing is happening is that it fills up its
buffers in main memory, then doesnt flush it to the disk.  If I stop the
command and issue a flush then the system starts working again.  But if
I dont issue a flush the system remains in that stalled state for like a
minute.  I am not completely sure how to best copy this large amount of
data over, but I would like any ideas.

I have 384mb of ram and am copying from an ATA 66 drive to a ATA 100
drive with a celeron 800mgh.

Also a little off topic for this email, but I have been using 2.4.17
since it came out.  Now this was the first kernel that I used the frame
buffer.  I always noticed it acted a bit wierd.  Now I just installed
2.4.18 rc1 and the frame buffer acts as I would have expected it to. 
Was the frame buffer broken in 2.4.17?  btw I am using the radeonfb.


-- 
-Scott Henson

shenson2@wvu.edu