Partion magic resizing of partition taking too long

[computer burger]

Hello,
I am currently in the middle of resizing the main partition of my hard drive from 133GB to 108GB. I will then be creating a new partition for installing Ubuntu onto.

The resizing of my main partition is taking an absurd amount of time, right now it says it has 30hours left in the process, and this is already on stage 2. The first stage took 24 hours.

What actually happened is the first stage of the process took about 24 hours, and then when I came back to check on it has appeared to start all over again but now with 33 hours as the time count down.

Is this a normal amount of time. The drive has a total space of about? The HD is about 160GB in total size, about 80 GB of space is used already on the main partition.

Thank you, and much appreciated for any comments

 

[linux_0]

When's the last time you checked your drive for errors? It's possible there could be something wrong with the drive itself at the hardware level, your file system may have problems or it could be a bug in the software you're using.

Please post your full specs and as much info as you can.

Semper Fi

 

[Ijack]

It's possible that if the disk was badly fragmented before the resize this could cause a problem. Although a resize can take many hours, this does seem a little excessive. But, if you value the data on the drive, all you can do is wait (unless you're prepared to start over and restore from your backups - you do have backups I take it?).

 

[computer burger]

Yes I do have backups of most everything; I think I'd prefer to wait it out and see if it can finish the resize; however, if appears to restart the resizing and again tell me it needs another 30 hours then I will cancel it.

I did check the drive for errors and fixed them previous to starting the resize. I also checked if it needed defragmenting and it said it didn't need it, that was according to Win Vista.

The computer is a 1.8 Ghz, 2GB RAM laptop so its not a slow machine.

 

[audiovoodoo]

Vista Defrag lies. I ran it and was advised no need to defrag. Ran through the AusLogic one and what do you know - 20 sec off the boot time.

Hope it all completed in the end for you.

 

[randomizer]

Vista defrag ignores files with fragments larger than 64MB. In a worst case scenario for one file, you could have a 10GB ISO in over 150 fragments and Vista will tell you it's a sunny day Open up a command prompt in Vista and run:

defrag z: -v -w

where z: is the drive you'll be shrinking. The -w switch will force the defrag to consolidate everything it can instead of just small things, and -v will give you a larger and more detailed report at the start and once it's done, details which are completely left out if you use the GUI defrag (I believe the report ignores >64MB fragments but they will still be consolidated).

Since you're unlikely to have millions of large file fragments you may not see a benefit but it's worth a shot.

On a side note, you can also resize the partition in Vista. Search for and run "Computer Management" in the start menu search, then go to "Disk Management" and you can resize there. Just don't bother to format the unallocated space as you'll only need to do it again when installing Ubuntu.

 

[audiovoodoo]

I'd imagine things can get very fragmented for uses of torrent sites then. At work I've finally got them to implement a weekly defrag on shutdown, our regular vocal users have been a lot quieter as a result. I still remember when NTFS hit the scene and MS were claiming it would not need to defrag. The guys at sysinternals killed that one dead.