[Solved]Trying to resize external HDD

What version of GParted did you use?

Did you move the start of the partition?

External hard drives and the interface to these drives often have transfer speeds that are much, much slower than internal drives.  Hence it might take a very long time for the process to complete.

If you cancel the process, then there is a high likelihood that the file system will be in an inconsistent state and your data could be lost.  That is one reason why we recommend that you always make a backup prior to any partition editing operations.

What step does GParted say is currently active?

You can also check to see if there are any hardware errors by using the command "dmesg" and looking for problems with the external drive.

To enter the "dmesg" command you would need to open a terminal window.  This is similar to the Windows DOS Prompt.

Reading data across an interface is significantly faster than reading data and writing it back to a different location.  This has to do with buffering that occurs both in your computer and possibly also in your disk drive, and also with time required for repositioning the drive heads.

Since we do not know at a given point in time whether the blocks being copied are file system meta data, or user data, I can not say with accuracy what your chances of recovering the data are.  I do know that if no hardware errors are encountered, then leaving the process to complete successfully will mean that you should have all of your data preserved.

If you moved the left hand side of the bar to the left, then yes you are moving the file system.  You can expand the details control to see what steps have completed and what step is currently in progress.

From your description it does not sound like a move operation is in progress.

Let's check to see if ntfsresize is still running.  From the Terminal windows, enter the following command:
ps -ef | grep ntfsresize | grep -v grep

Does this command list an ntfsresize process running?

If ntfsresize has finished running then we might have encountered a problem that first appeared with Bug 575324 -  Copying a huge NTFS partition (e.g., > 100 GB) never finishes.

I am not sure about the recursive fault problem, but if a reboot is needed then that is not an option we should consider at this point in time.

EDIT:  If ntfsresize has finished and it appears that the problem is that GParted is simply waiting for ntfsresize to finish, then it is probably safe to quit GParted.  The only discrepancy will be that the partition will be larger than the file system.  This could be fixed by running GParted again and resizing the partition down to the same size again.

The date listed is the starting date of the process.  Since the process still shows up it is still executing.  You could confirm this by checking if the lights on the disk drive are still flashing to indicate activity.

OK, well I decided to cancel the operation because there was no activity on the hard drive so it wasn't doing anything anyway. So I kept my fingers crossed as I booted into Windows to check to see if my data is there.

It looks like all of my data is there and it also looks like it resized the partition but didn't create the new partition. So I am going to back up all of my files now and try and start over.

Before I mark this as solved, any thoughts as to why it did this? Can I assume that the filesystem is OK and just try and add the new partition to the unallocated space or should I format the whole drive and start from scratch?

Thanks for the suggestion. What I ended up doing was backing everything up on my desktop and I used gparted to format the drive and create the two partitions.

That process went MUCH better. It took a couple hours to back up all of my files, but once that was done gparted was able to format and create the two partitions in less than 5 minutes. I will mark this one as solved.

Thanks for the help!