1 Topic by daveb59 (edited by daveb59 2010-02-06 19:09:37)

  • daveb59
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2010-02-06
  • Posts: 3

Topic: [SOLVED] No activity while moving a partition

I'm trying to use the 0.5.1-1 Live CD to shrink and move a ext4 partition.

Everything seemed to be going okay at first. Looking in the details on the "Applying pending operations" screen, I see that it shrank the partition without issue. It also looks like it had no problem performing a read-only test and computing an optimal blocksize. It also didn't find any bad blocks when it tested the file system.

When it came time to perform a real move it started and then stopped after moving 322.53 MiB of 12.91 GiB. The progress bar hasn't moved in an hour. There is no disk activity at all. I opened up a terminal window and ran top to see if maybe it was just really busy doing something with the CPU, but gpartedbin (I'm assuming that is the process I want to watch) is barely active. I've received no error messages.

Is this normal for GParted?

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
  • Developer
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-11-30
  • Posts: 4,593

Re: [SOLVED] No activity while moving a partition

This is not normal.  It sounds like the application has frozen.  Does GParted still respond to input?

It might be useful to run the "dmesg" command and check to see if any disk related hardware problems are being reported.

3 Reply by daveb59 (edited by daveb59 2010-02-06 19:16:34)

  • daveb59
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2010-02-06
  • Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] No activity while moving a partition

You're right, there are some hardware related error messages in dmesg. Log shows errors like

hdc: possibly failed opcode: 0xa0
end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 223232
Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 55808
Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 55809
hdc: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: command error: error=0x54 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x05 }

GParted was responding and I was able to browse through the details sections on the "Applying..." screen. It also accepted me cancelling the operation after I'd waited several hours. I crossed my fingers and re-tried the same operation and it worked the second time. A hollow victory perhaps, since it sounds like my hard drive is starting to have problems.

4 Reply by daveb59

  • daveb59
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2010-02-06
  • Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] No activity while moving a partition

Marked as solved since it sounds like it was a hardware problem.

I do wish GParted could have told me there was a problem instead of quietly slipping into whatever indeterminate state it was in, but maybe that just wasn't possible for some reason.

5 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
  • Developer
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-11-30
  • Posts: 4,593

Re: [SOLVED] No activity while moving a partition

I am glad to hear that you were able to solve the problem.

Improving feedback on operations is one of the tasks in my todo jar.  smile