Partition Resizing Frozen

[beamed24]

Hello All,

I got partition manager 10 from the GOTD deal. I had a hd with two partitions on it. I used the software to resize the smaller one, adding 60 gb from the second partition.

It now seems to have frozen and is not doing any more work. I cant even cancel the operation. I have Win XP 64, It got nearly all the way through the process, getting stuck at "updating partitions letter in system hive on Hard Disk 1, partition 0"

It has been stuck there since last night, with a total run time of nearly 20 hours.

is there anything that I can do? My data is all backed up. would a hard reset be a bad idea? or should I let it run a little longer. i didnt think a partition resize would take a full 24 hrs!

[MudCrab]

If it were me, I would reset the computer. It's possible that the resize has finished and the program is hung on something else. It's also possible that the partitions may be corrupted after the reset.

Hopefully, you have all the data on the drive backed up and have previously done successful restores.

I strongly recommend creating an Entire Disk Image backup of a drive prior to making any partitioning changes. The software is designed to be safe, but things can easily go wrong.

[Paragon_Tommy]

Hello beamed24,

If it was stucked at "updating partitions letter in system hive on Hard Disk 1, partition 0", it's something we can go back and correct if Windows doesn't boot, since it looks like the major processes finished.

When in Windows, do check if the new partitions reflect the changes, otherwise I would carry out this operation again from the recovery disk.

[mattnz]

Hi there

Im having a similar problem.

I have 3 1Tb drives in RAID 5. I wanted to resize a ~1.9Tb patition (approx 2/3 full) to 1.5Tb and create a second 400Gb partition.

After queuing these operations and executing them, Paragon then asked for a restart (I guess because the os is on the partion I wanted to resize), so I obliged. The boot utility started fine and all was well until the 'move partition' operation. Here the GUI froze and wouldn't respond to anything not even esc or ctrl+c, not wanting to loose my data I left it alone and went to bed. When I woke up, no change, so again I left it and I went to work. I got back from work almost 22hours after starting the process to find the GUI working again. It shows 64Gb 'read so far', 63Gb 'write so far' and 0.2Mb 'copied' as well as a 'are you sure you want to cancel, you may loose data?' dialog box (this must be from last night when I was pressing esc and ctrl+c). Not wanting to lose data I said 'no' and now the GUI is frozen again.

This is a mixed blessing, I now know the program is still working even if it seems frozen but it also means this process is going to take about 6 days to complete (judging by the progress). This timeframe seems ridiculous, is there any way I can speed this up or cancel this operation without loosing my data?

[Paragon_Tommy]

Most likely, if you stop the process now, you'll run into more headaches. Unless you have a good backup and don't mind running it, I strongly encourage to let the process finish. Otherwise we're looking at a delete/undelete operation.

It's not surprising that it's slow for 2TB especially with 1.4 TB of data.

[mattnz]

Thanks Tommy, that is what I feared, unfortunately, the only back up I have is from about 8months ago. What is the likely success rate of a delete/undelete operation?

[SIW2]

Hi mattnz,

In my experience the success rate is very good. However, you may wish to wait to hear from Tommy - he will know much more about your situation than I.

Unfortunately, it is the weekend. I don't think the PSG team visit weekends.

If you decide to go ahead anyway, you may like to read this thread first :

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=256171

[mattnz]

Hi SIW2,

I took the plunge, I couldn't stand waiting for 6 days without any feedback as to whether the process was even working.

I have a question about the Partitioin Recovery program you linked to in the other thread. Using the utility my 3 RAIDed HDDs show up individually and I can only seem to scan 1 drive at a time. Since the partition is spread across all 3 isnt this going to affect the programs ability to find and recover things? Is there something I need to do differently for a RAID array?

[SIW2]

It's looking for partitions - when you recover them , it just writes the info to the partition table exactly as was.

I don't think it matters that it only scans one HD at a time. Try scanning and see if it offers you the correct partitions to recover - no harm in a scan.

Assuming you get the partitions back exactly as they were, the files now on them will be accessible as before.

Not sure where you got to with Paragon and whether any data has actually been moved.

Did you try booting the Paragon cd first and see what it offered?

[mattnz]

Hi SIW2 thanks for the quick response

I haven't tried the Paragon CD, I dont have the PM boot disk so I had to download the RKE but I cant get that to boot (I use a bootable USB drive because I dont have a working cd/dvd drive - I've never had problems before but for some reason I cant seem to boot from it).

Im not 100% sure but I imagine that data has been moved already. Isn't that why it was taking so long?

So far Partition Wizard is 15% through the first disk and hasnt found anything.

[SIW2]

Hi Matt,

Depending on how you stopped the operation - the paragon PM boot disc may be able to pick up where it left off - or give the option. I aguess you were using PM10 free version , which is why you don't have the boot disc?

While PW is having having a look you could see if you can get hold of Paragon PM9.5SE. and get the boot disc from that onto a flash drive.

The build number of PM9.5SE is the same as the last PM10 personal I saw - so should work just as well.

It has been given away recently - and probably still is - so googling will come up with somewhere you can get it.

In terms of undeleting - the PW can scan everything - the PM will only scan unallocated space.

It is worth having a look with both.

[mattnz]

In the end I didn't have much luck with PW, mainly because I dont think it supports raid arrays.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of PM and I created a USB recovery disk which works, at last.

Went into Normal Mode -> PM then after about 15min of waiting the software loaded.

2 drives are showing up.
D: The flash drive I booted from 1.9Gb
C: My Raid array 1.82Tb (1.3Tb used, 536Gb free)

What is my best step from here? Should I do as tommy said above and delete the partition then undelete it, or is there a way I can try to repair the partition without deleting it?

Things are very slow and its very difficult to navigate, I'm getting about 0.1 frames per second. I wonder If this is because of the overhead my raid controller is putting on the HDD's as it tries to resync the raid volume.

[SIW2]

Hi Matt.,

You have made progress - checked PW and it isn't right for your setup - and got a bootable copy of Paragon ( which did you get, PM9.5? )

I would wait to see what Tommy advises as the next step.

[SIW2]

It is not surprising it is very slow.

If you look at Zar - they do specialist recovery apps. - I am not suggesting you buy that - but take a look at what they say:

... taking impractically long and finally running out of memory while attempting to recover an 1TB RAID5 array holding about three millions of files.

There are three major aspects of this,

* 1TB of disk space takes quite a long time to scan
* Processing 3,000,000 files requires massive computation effort.
* Memory requirements also become a concern with 3,000,000 files.


Recovering a huge RAID volume requires that you do some prior planning and set up. You do not want the system to run out of memory and start swapping, as the recovery will grind to a halt. So to recover some really big array, you need to

* have at least 3GB (preferably 4GB) physical memory installed.
* make sure you have some place to offload that data

Under these conditions, ZAR will recover an array containing about 12,000,000 objects (files and directories combined). This number is a full-stop limit - if the volume contains more than 12M objects, ZAR will eventually run out of memory.

On the other hand, a typical NTFS volume, something you most likely have at home, contains 500,000 files or less. For this typical setup, 512MB of a physical memory is enough with low cache size, and 1GB is enough if you have the cache size at maximum. Most of the reasonably modern systems will thus perform quite well on a typical volume. In these cases, no additional tweaks are necessary.

[mattnz]

Thanks for all the help SIW2.

By the look of things there's no quick fix, at this stage I'd just be happy just to get my data back intact.

Im not sure if Paragon works in the same way as ZAR but memory shouldn't be a problem. I doubt I have anywhere near 12M files/folders and with 6Gb of physical memory I should be ok here.

I'll wait to hear from Tommy before I do anything further.

[Paragon_Tommy]

There's really no other way to do undelete with Paragon. As SIW2 mentioned, there may be other programs that can do a better job. But, I think the operation was interrupted during a final step, so it shouldn't be too damaged.

[Howard Kaikow]

Originally Posted by MudCrab

If it were me, I would reset the computer. It's possible that the resize has finished and the program is hung on something else. It's also possible that the partitions may be corrupted after the reset.

Reset only as a last resort.

Hopefully, you have all the data on the drive backed up and have previously done successful restores.

I strongly recommend creating an Entire Disk Image backup of a drive prior to making any partitioning changes. The software is designed to be safe, but things can easily go wrong.

Ayup!