1 Topic by Anonymous

  • Anonymous
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  • Registered: 2015-09-30
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Topic: Gparted (seems to be) working, external harddisc idle

Hi all,

As the title suggests, I have a external harddrive (WD passport (2TB)) which fell on the ground while moving the computer. At that time I was moving data with gparted to create a small partition at the beginning of the disc. The cable got disconnected during transfer.

In order to use the disc again I run a check and if needed a repair. This going on for at least 2 days now. When I look at gparted it seems to be working (the progress bar is moving from left to right and back), however, the disc seems idle and not working.

I need some advice on how to procede from here. Can I disconnect the disc or stop gparted from its job?

I'm running Mint 17.2 64 bit and I installed gparted from the repo.

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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  • Registered: 2007-11-30
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Re: Gparted (seems to be) working, external harddisc idle

If the move process was interrupted, then it is not advisable to run a check on the partition because this action will most likely make things much worse than they already are.

If the process has been running for over 2 days, then either the disk is very large (multi-terabytes in size), or more likely the process has hung or gone into an infinite loop.

You can check what is going on behind the scenes by opening a terminal window and running ps -ef | less and then looking for the gparted process and also any disk check or fsck process.

If it appears that nothing is progressing, then I'd suggest killing GParted and rebooting your computer.

If you do not have a backup of your data, you might try using photorec to scan the disk surface looking for recognizable files.  Please note that this is a time intensive process and will require much manual work on your part.