1

I have used GParted live to shrink my Windows partition from 530 to 430 GB. The disk is largely defragmented and only 66 GB are used. Since almost 6 hours now the shrink progress bar shows what looks like 100% (took maybe 5 minutes to get there) while the process still reports "0 out of 1 operations completed". Disk operation light is constantly shining and the disk rotating, it gives a constant humming sound instead of the usual clicking.

What could be wrong and is it safe to cancel this operation?

https://ibb.co/n92zzn

Jordan181
  • 33
  • Sounds like it's working... check a system monitor(s) & verify disk activity. Interrupting it could corrupt the partition, but you should have a backup anyway before attempting this, so not a permanent loss – Xen2050 Apr 01 '18 at 21:36
  • I tried to force cancel after 10 hours, especially as GParted showed that only 80mb had the be moved. GParted was unable to force cancel and wasn't properly responding, leaving only shutdown as option. The drive booted fine afterwards and the partition had not been shrunk.

    How would you have checked disk activity however while in GParted live? Any special terminal commands I overlooked? Thanks.

     – Jordan181 Apr 01 '18 at 23:04

1 Answers1

0

Since the hard drive activity light was on, that should mean the drive is doing something, so I'd be reluctant to kill it.

Checking for disk activity (read/write) should say if something's actually happening and if it's just reading (and less likely to damage anything if killed) or writing.

  • iotop should show what processes are reading/writing & how much.

  • most system monitors should at least show a system-wide graph, conky can show per-device read/write speed & graphs

  • see /sys/block/sd[X]/stat or /proc/diskstats but some processing may be required. [source]

  • htop should be able to show disk R/W too. [source]

Next time I'd try checking the process tree under gparted, with top or htop but I'd just do ps auxf and search for gparted. One of the child processes could have crashed without telling it's parent & leaving it hanging. Killing the lowest child should/could get gparted to "wake up" and do something, without having to kill everything.

Xen2050
  • 13,991