Resizing partition during more than 5hours!

[chasheen]

Hi,

I use the DD to resize a 321GB partition at 85% full into a 351GB partition. I the extra space is coming form a logical partition situated before my 321GB partition, the space was used, no partition was existing.

My computer asked me for a reboot for change to take effect. I restarted the computer, saw some DD progress bar for about 5min, then my computer reboot again but this time by itselft. I thought the task was completed but I still had a DD window after the reboot, nothing seems to happen... I have a Media center casing (not frontal HDD activity LED) so I can not control if the hard drive is working.

I let it run for more than 5hours, without knowing what was going on when I decided to do a manual shutdown. When I started again the computer I endup once again with the DD page saying:

Analyzing partitions 100%
Analyzing partitions 100%
Analyzing partitions 100%

I have windows XP SP3 as OS, one internal hdd, 3 external hdd(USB)

Now I am wondering if this is normal, because of size of final partition it take time may be to move data or if I should start my computer in safe mode? Will I lose all my data?

Any advice?

Thank in advace,

chasheen:'(

[Coffee999]

Mine did the same thing only I was only moving 30 gigs of space from one partition to another. I've seen it do this on other occasions too.

I didn't think this was right, so I shutdown the computer and did a restart. Didn't help. So I did a restart in safe mode. That worked. The I did a regular boot, and everything was normal. And the partition change took affect fine.

Why is this happening? This can't be normal and it seems if happening to more than just me.

[k0lo]

Probably because the "full" mode version of DD uses Linux, and if your particular hardware (usually newer chipsets and SATA/RAID controllers) is not fully supported then disk operations can be very slow or not work at all.

For changes to your internal disk where you do not need networking or USB support you may find the "safe" mode version of DD, which uses DOS, to be faster.

[chasheen]

{QUOTE-> Mine did the same thing only I was only moving 30 gigs of space from one partition to another. I've seen it do this on other occasions too.

I didn't think this was right, so I shutdown the computer and did a restart. Didn't help. So I did a restart in safe mode. That worked. The I did a regular boot, and everything was normal. And the partition change took affect fine.

Why is this happening? This can't be normal and it seems if happening to more than just me. <-QUOTE}


Hi,

I finaly restarted my computer twice again. Windows managed to start. I didn't lose any data but the partition merge didn't happen.
I don't know what happen, I am not sure I want to try again before I back up my 300GB data, and do the delete and create new partition with windows tools.... so bye bye Disk Director

[Coffee999]

{QUOTE-> Probably because the "full" mode version of DD uses Linux, and if your particular hardware (usually newer chipsets and SATA/RAID controllers) is not fully supported then disk operations can be very slow or not work at all.

For changes to your internal disk where you do not need networking or USB support you may find the "safe" mode version of DD, which uses DOS, to be faster. <-QUOTE}

So you are saying DD doesn't fully support XP ? That can't be true. The thing is most of the time it works fine. But sometimes it hangs on that startup screen described above.

Me and chasheen are having the exact same issue. I don't know if this happends everytime to chasheen, but only happends ever so often to me. There must be an explaination for this besides the full version was designed for Linux!

[k0lo]

But that is the explanation. When you reboot to do any operations in DD you are shutting down Windows and running in a standalone, bootable recovery environment, which just happens to be Linux.

Of course operations done while running Windows XP will succeed, but if any of the operations involve a reboot then XP is shut down and the operation proceeds in Linux (full mode) or DOS (safe mode).