Is it normal for main Directory Opus UI to freeze while performing operations on a damaged drive and (presumably) encountering damaged portions?
I would expect the operation window (copy in this case) to freeze, not the whole main UI including all open listers.
It depends, but you're probably seeing an OS level problem.
What happens in other software?
Windows Explorer is usable while Dopus is frozen. Windows Explorer is usable while the delete command is stuck on a specific file for example, whole Windows Explorer freezes only if during the already frozen (only dialogue box) delete operation I open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the affected drive, otherwise it still works. Most interesting is that Dopus is frozen while running the aforementioned delete operation in Windows Explorer, although this last one might be due to a tab being open there, but not focussed.
It sounds like anything that accesses the drive will cause a freeze, and Opus (as you have it configured etc.) is just accessing it in more situations than Explorer.
You could close the folder tree, and tabs pointing to the drive
and hide anything on toolbars that displays or references the drive. Opus shouldn't access it then in most circumstances.
But if the drive is corrupt then the best thing to do is copy the data off it ASAP, doing nothing that modifies the drive, and then replace the hardware (if it's a hardware problem) or format the drive (if it's just data corruption of some kind). Deleting files off a broken drive doesn't make sense
Yeah, no worries about data, just using it as a scratch disk, have a whole stack of removed Seagate drives with bad sectors.
Ok it looks like the open tabs that haven't been touched in hours have been tripping it up, when I close those, it doesn't happen while deleting with Windows Explorer. However deleting with Dopus (starting delete and then browsing elsewhere with that only tab) still freezes the lister, but now a new lister doesn't freeze.
The main problem is that tabs aren't separate from main UI and that they access data in the background for some reason which immediately causes a freeze when I never touched them (even when reopening Dopus with old tabs and never thouching them).
Thanks for the clarification.
There are options in Preferences to prevent tabs from trying to load folders until they go active, which may help with the tabs.
Ah, I checked this for network drives before, but didn't realize all drives were set to load in background. This should reduce the problem a bit, thanks.