linux - How long should it take for gparted to shrink a 44 GB partition down to 10 GB

07
2014-07
  • Robert Klubenspies

    I've had gparted running to shrink a Backtrack partition down to 10 GB from 44 GB. I was wondering how long that should take and wether or not it's jammed. It's been on "shrink file system" for well over an hour now.

    • Answers
  • techie007

    A long time. An hour doesn't surprise me in the least.

    The size of the drive matters, the size of the data matters, the bus it's on matters (USB?), the fragmentation of the drive before resizing matters, shifting the data while shrinking it also matters.

    It's basically impossible for us to tell you.

    I like this quote from here: "The resize process can take a while depending on how big your drive is and how much the partition's size was changed. So, you may want to go and get a nice cup of tea and relax."


    • Related Question

    linux - resizing partitions with gparted
  • hasenj

    When I installed linux, there was a program that ran during installation which allowed me to allocate space from my hard disk to create a new partition. I think this was the GNOME Partition Editor; gparted.

    Essentially it resized the (one and only) partition on the disk (which happened to be NTFS), it moved files around to create a continuous free space for the creation of a new partition.

    I want now to resize my partitions again using the same program, that is, gparted.

    If I run this program normally from linux, I can't resize any partition; the resize buttons are disabled. What can I do about this? I've thought of the following:

    • Unmount all paritions first. This might enable resizing them, but could be dangerous, I don't want to try it without knowing the consequences first.
    • Run gparted from a live CD. This is the obvious solution, but a bit of a hassle, and you'd think there could be a better way.

    What should I do?


    • Related Answers
  • zappan

    run gparted from a live CD. it's not that much of a hassle, and it works with NTFS.

    you shouldn't resize partitions on-the-fly from the running OS, even when unmounted, it's just asking for trouble

  • jweede

    Running from the LiveCD is the best bet.

    One of the problems I used to run into was the swap partition. Since you have Linux installed, it should have a swap partition that the LiveCD will start using as well. Make sure to right click and select 'Swapoff' on the swap partition, this will allow you to manipulate all of the drives partitions

  • Tim Lytle

    I believe the NTFS support is not install by default, while it is on the LiveCD. To install NTFS support, use the ntfsprogs package.

    sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

    Then restart gparted and you should be able to resize the partition.

    Note that if the NTFS partition was not powered down correctly, gparted will still give you issues. The solution in that case is to put the drive in a Windows computer, boot it, run:

    chkdsk /f

    Shutdown and boot it cleanly a few times in Windows. Then put it into you Ubuntu machine, and try gparted again.