1 Topic by astor

  • astor
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Topic: Loop type and performance problems

I tried today to resize and move an NTFS (Vista) partition and got the following problem during the boot up process, which seems to occur to some other gparted users:

!!Invalid loop location/gparted.dat
!!Please export loop with a valid location or reboot and pass a proper loop=...
!!kernel command line!


After that I get /bin/ash:can't access tty; Job control turned off
/Newroot#

After many investigations, I were able to fix it by changing the SATA setup in the BIOS. The SATA IDE can be set to enhenced or compatibility. Setting to compatibility has fixed this problem, this may be help someone else.

My problem now. the performance seems to be very low. To resize a partion from 350GB to 150GB, and to move it it has used more than 15 hours, is that usual? could the performance be improved?

Thanks for your help and sugestions.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: Loop type and performance problems

You don't mention the exact version of the livecd.

Moving a partition on the same hard drive can be sometimes quite long. 15 hours is rather long but there were cases it took even longer. However, this could vary from a version to another.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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Re: Loop type and performance problems

Hi!

Im "Compatibility" mode, the SATA controller acts towards the BIOS and operating system as an old PATA controller would - so some SATA-specific features are not available which can in fact have an impact on performance. In addition to this, this "compatibility" mode is primarily meant as a last resort if you want to run older operating systems that don't understand SATA (or if there's no SATA driver for your controller and chipset available), so this would be one point where performance tuning seems not so important (modern operating systems usually speak SATA).
In addition to this, the "compatibility" mode may report wrong information about the DMA capabilities of the controller and driver - so the drive might be running at a low Ultra-DMA mode, or (even worse) in Multiword DMA or PIO only - which increases the CPU load caused by each hard drive access and thus slows down operation. You can check the transfer mode using the command

hdparm -i /dev/hda

- of course you must adapt this command to the device name of your hard drive. If you know what youÄre doing, you can also manipulate the transfer mode using hdparm however, for safety reasons you should do any of these things only after GParted has done its work (or before it starts).
If you used an older version of GParted, switching to a newser version could help - newer LiveCDs include newer Linux kernels, which have drivers for newer hardware - and will thus have better SATA support (among other enhancements), so maybe the "Enhanced" mode will work under a newer LiveCD, or the "compatibility" mode may use a better transfer mode (since the kernel knows better about the SATA chipset and can maybe work around known bugs).

4 Reply by astor

  • astor
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Re: Loop type and performance problems

Thanks all for your replies.

I was using using the gparted live cd version 0.3.4-11. As I already finished the reorg, I'll try in the next time with the latest live cd to see if there is any differences in the perfs.