alt Hacker News> As a user, what am I supposed to do with such a popup?
Change the floppy disk. In the MSDOS days those messages were useful, as read errors might be caused by having the wrong floppy in the drive. The OS had no way to know when the floppy was changed and "Retry" allowed you to swap the disks back and try again. In modern days it is less useful, the behavior just got carried over.
Windows addresses this issue somewhat by scanning the directory tree before the actual copying starts, this can catch some errors before they happen and gives you better progress reporting on top.
But a single dialog that keeps track of the whole copy/move operations, not a modal dialog attached to individual read/write calls would be the way to go here. This is a case of the GUI sticking to close to what the OS is doing instead of what the user intended to do.
> Windows addresses this issue somewhat by scanning the directory tree before the actual copying starts
Which really sucks because no you need to wait for minutes before it actually starts moving or deleting. I generally just abort, start the midnight commander or just invoke mv/del directly.
> But a single dialog that keeps track of the whole copy/move operations
Which is what is the case here? The question and buttons appear in that dialog.