[GRASSLIST:7684] Import of USGS STDS DEM quad is taking forever...

[David Adam]

Help!
  I'm trying to load a USGS STDS DEM model of a single quadrangle into 
Grass 6.0.
The system agreed to import the data and produced the messages below.  
It appears to
be stuck in a loop - it has been running for 12 hours, with a process 
named set_data
consuming nearly 100% of the cpu cycles.  This cannot be normal, or no 
one would ever
get anything done.
  The only hint of an error in the messages is the note that no 
transformation parameters
were specified.  When I was setting up the region, I did specify that 
the system should use the
default, but that seems to be interpreted as not specifying anything at 
all.  And the system then
notes that it is using the nad27 values as a default.
  So, what am I doing wrong?  I am still on the vertical portion of the 
learning curve, and any
help will be most appreciated.

tia,
david

OUTPUT:

r.in.gdal 'input=/home/david/gis/DEMs/California/Lake 
County/Middletown/8976CATD.DDF' output=DEM 'title=Digital Elevation Model'
A datum name nad27 (North_American_Datum_1927) was specified without 
transformation parameters.

Non-interactive mode: the GRASS default for nad27 is 
towgs84=-22.000,157.000,176.000.
Projection of input dataset and current location appear to match.
Proceeding with import...


CREATING SUPPORT FILES FOR DEM

=================================

The grass message above the line has not changed in ~12 hours

System: Fedora core 3, Grass 6.0, 2.8 MHz Pentium 4, 512 MB (Dell 4700)

=================================

top - 08:52:46 up 1 day,  2:00,  3 users,  load average: 2.36, 2.32, 2.38
Tasks:  95 total,   2 running,  93 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 69.4% us, 30.6% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    506232k total,   497592k used,     8640k free,    76244k buffers
Swap:  1020088k total,      208k used,  1019880k free,   100588k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 6887 david     25   0  2708 1144  816 R 98.9  0.2 782:19.00 set_data
 6890 david     15   0 38012  13m 8440 S  0.7  2.7   0:25.51 gnome-terminal
 4878 david     25  10 34120  19m  10m S  0.3  4.0   0:08.93 rhn-applet-gui
...snip...