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Topic: Time to Move Partition

Hello,

I am trying to free up some space to grow my c: drive by taking it away from my d: drive (Hardware RAID5).  I shrunk the sda2 drive and am in the process of moving it to the end of the partition so I can grow the sda1 drive.

My question is this:  the task list in GParted when I select "details" shows TWO tasks, both titled "Move sda2".  It has completed the first move and is in the process of doing the second move.  Why are there two separate tasks for the same thing, and how long should this take?  The first move took 19 hours, and if I had any idea that it would have taken this long I would have done it on a weekend since our Exchange server is now down.  Any ideas why there is a second "move" task and how long the second one should take?  Thanks in advance for any hints or comments.

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Re: Time to Move Partition

Hi,

There usually is a readonly testrun and if that's succesfull the real move. You can easily calculate the time involved by (roughly) taking IO-speed / 2 (because of reading/writing on the same device).

While harddisk capacity grows faster than the IO harddiskoperation will only get 'slower' with each new generation of harddisks smile

I must say that 19 hours is an immensily long time. Is this RAID unusually big and/or slow?
Also, i'd like to see the saved details once it's finished, could be interesting to see what took so long and maybe we can even find room for improvement smile
See http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/ti … etails.htm for info on how to save the details.

thnx!

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Re: Time to Move Partition

Thanks for the response.  The sda2 drive is 650 gigabytes, so yes, it could probably be considered to be "unusually big".  I will try saving the details and posting after the second move is completed.

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Re: Time to Move Partition

ok, thnx smile

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Re: Time to Move Partition

I followed the instructions on saving the .htm file to a floppy, but for some reason it didn't copy; when I brought Windows back up - the floppy was empty sad

The good news is that the resizing operation was a total success - thanks for a great program!

The total time from start to finish to move the 450 GB partition to the right was 43 hours.  But all I care about right now is having my Exchange server back smile

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Re: Time to Move Partition

wow, that's quite slow. A quick estimation would guess your IO speed at 3MiB/sec ...
Is it really this slow or do we need to work on the algorithm?

Maybe you could run 'hdparm -Tt <device>' on the raid? This would give us some clue about the IO speed.

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Re: Time to Move Partition

Would I need to run that command from the live CD?  (I assume it's not a Windows command)

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Re: Time to Move Partition

I also had to move about 120GB on a HDD, and the initial scan took 19 hrs. When the move started after 19hrs and it said that it would take another 40hrs to complete, I cancelled the operation. No damage done, thanks be!

50-60hrs to move 120GB partition seems very very long. Any progress on this? Incidentally, my drive is Maxtor, and I was using the livecd.