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GParted hanged for hours on shrinking

rated 0 times [ 4] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 13946 / 2 Years ago, sat, december 18, 2021, 3:35:43

GParted is stuck on the shrinking step for the last 25 hours trying to shrink my 442GB Windows 8 oartition to 426GB. This partition is on my SATA HDD and I aḿ only modifying the end of the partition in order to put my new Ubuntu after it.

Should I just keep waiting or is there anything else I can do to speed up or cancel (without data loss) the process?

EDIT:

Gparted is still running, here's the current state from top:

15773 - root - 20 - 0 - 454m - 25m - 19m - R - 1,7 - 0,2 - 44:14.40 gpartedbin

So it looks to me it's still doing something isn't it? What's worrying me (but I'm surely mistaken there) is that glances doesn't notice anything happening on the HDD (IN and OUT) and there are those A_DENY on the gpartedbin line for the columns IO_R and IO_W (respectively read and write I guess?).

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antoccasiona

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3 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago panshow · Accepted Answer

So, after waiting for almost 50 hours on this I just gave up and decided to cancel the shrinking operation even though that could have meant data loss.

Once the operation was cancelled GParted couldn't recognize properly the Windows 8 partition, so I tried to use GParted to recover it. Without success.

That's when I decided to go for PhotoRec and TestDisk and I was surprised when TestDisk couldn't detect any errors on my partitions (even with the deeper search feature) and even better than that I was able to see that all my files and folders where intact on my W8 partition!

That's when I decided to give it a go and reboot it, but unfortunately (and as expect I should say) my W8 mbr was broken, so I used my W7 recover disk (I upgraded from W7 to W8 via downloading from Microsoft) to boot and run from the command line tool Bootrec.exe /fixmbr and voila! All my data was still there and my W8 was repaired (first thing I did was running a check disk that found no error).

To get back onto the Ubuntu subject, I decided to shrink the W8 partition from Windows this time, so after a few defragmentation runs and use of MyDefrag (to get the data at the beginning of my disk when possible) I was able to shrink my W8 partition enough to make space for my Ubuntu install.

To conclude I think that in my case GParted really was hanging (for nothing) as no data has been lost from my W8 partition, and althought that took me a few days to repair I feel lucky that cancelling the shrinking didn't do any damage for me.

What I do recommend though is that if you want to shrink your Windows partition before installing ubuntu (or any other OS) next to it, use the windows tool for that (diskmgmt.msc).