Changing cluster size taking *forever*

Discussion in 'Paragon Partition Manager Product Line' started by sdorshan, Dec 3, 2012.

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  1. sdorshan

    sdorshan Registered Member

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    I decided to try changing the cluster size on an internal 1 TB NTFS drive from 512 to 4096. The drive was about 1/3 full, single partition.

    Partition Manager 10 has been running for *6 days* so far, and I have no idea when it might finish. It's modifying the cluster size on disk. It's running in standalone boot mode.

    It occasionally changes the Time Worked and Time to Finish to seemingly random numbers, since they go up and down and bear no relation to anything.

    I'm pretty sure it's not hung because the disk light is solidly on, but I can occasionally hear it seeking.

    I'm afraid that if the power goes out, or something else happens, that it will leave the disk scrogged completely. And I would like to have the computer back at some point.

    Has anyone changed the cluster size on a 1TB drive with data on it, and could tell me how long it took? Would stopping PM leave the partition unusable?
     
  2. jonyjoe101

    jonyjoe101 Registered Member

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    yes it is taking too long, it shouldn't take more than 3 or 4 hours. Your drive might have been corrupted and that is why it's taking so long.

    Worst case scenario and the drive is interrupted, you will have a "raw" drive. this has occur to me when I was partitioning a 500gb hard drive with about 400gb of data (trying to split into 30gb and 470gb) the drive hanged during the split and after a few hours I had to restart the computer.
    For this type of scenario, you need software that can recover "lost partitions", I used testdisk and it recovered the partition without losing the data. This has occured to me twice and both times I was able to recover the lost partitions. From my own expierence, it is possible to recover from your situation.
     
  3. sdorshan

    sdorshan Registered Member

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    I don't think it could possibly happen in 3-4 hours. It took several days to do a Windows backup of that drive to an external USB drive.

    I'm just speculating, but to adjust the cluster size from 512 to 4K, every file has to be moved to start on an aligned 4K boundary, contiguous single sector files have to be separated, blocks of free space have to be coalesced into new free space, and I'm guessing that a defrag is a side effect of the whole process, unless it's just relocating everything to free space, of which there is plenty.

    I don't see it all happening in a few hours, but a week seems to be out of line. It's still doing something. I hear the disk going, and it occasionally updates its time estimate with a fictional number.
     
  4. sdorshan

    sdorshan Registered Member

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    No sooner than I posted my last message that I saw that it had finished! 8 days.

    Let this be a record for anyone encountering this lengthy process in the future.
     
  5. Paragon_Matt

    Paragon_Matt Paragon Moderator

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    Again, it depends upon the amount of data when converting. and with the PM 10 engine, it runs slower than newer versions, but that process as a whole is slow because you are converting sectors.
     
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