Windows Vs Linux

[dragonbofh.livejournal.com]

A lady collared me this morning nice and early about her laptop failing to boot with part of windows reported as missing or corrupt.
No major biggie I've dealt with this before.
I run a few tests, try a few methods of repair but very little works. I decide that it'll be quicker to pull her data off the machine, rebuild and then transfer her data back onto the machine than it will be to wait for the various fixes to run through and potentially not work.

This is not the TSH.

The TSH is that it took me all of 45 minutes to copy ~9gig of her data over to the local server... using a live boot of Ubuntu.
I've now been using a Windows Command Line to copy her data back over to the laptop... almost 3 hours and it's still going... What the holy crap?

Comments

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

One problem I occasionally run into in similar situations is that the Ethernet (card- and OS-dependent, of course) fails to autonegotiate the speed and duplex correctly, which makes network speeds suck (assuming it works at all).

[sethb.livejournal.com]

I suspect virus protection.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

xcopy *is* slow. Why not just use the liveCD again?

[dragonbofh.livejournal.com]

Because the data was on a NAS box which holds many people's data =P couldn't take that down for the sake of 1 person.

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

sounds like a hard drive with bad sectors.

or voodoo.

[dragonbofh.livejournal.com]

I vote voodoo!

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Windows copy vs Command prompt copy - time it on large files and on many files. Weird differences.

[dreamatdrew]

Item 1: Windows CLI copy does.... well... funky things. Things that make my brain hurt to the point that I want to stab my brain with a Q-tip just to make it end.
Item 2: MS's implementation of SMB/CIFS/Whatvertheycallitnow is craptacularly goofy and inefficient. Samba is orders of magnitude a better implementation. Therefore, it work faster...

[dreamatdrew]

Side note which just occurred to me: Any implementation of SMB/Samba is going to copy a smaller number of files faster, even if the actual amount of data passed through the pipes otherwise is identical.

[japester.livejournal.com]

actually, no. The other way around.
Copying a few number of large files is noticeably quicker than copying lots of small files.
The area you gain the speed in is the reduced amount of file seeking and opening.

[steppenlaeufer.livejournal.com]

Uhm, that's what s/he said.

"copy a smaller number of files faster" = "Copying a few number of large files is noticeably quicker"

[japester.livejournal.com]

hmmmm my brain must not have had enough coffee when I read that. I parsed it wrong.
I interpreted it as small files, not smaller number of files.

which, as we all agree on, makes the difference.

[dreamatdrew]

"He", for the record...

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Windows' file system handling is very slow for making new files, and very very slow for interleaving operations on the same volume, like the boot volume. For this reason, I try to use cd-booting tools like BartPE or ERD to copy back and forth when there is any need for speed.