How Long Should resize2fs Take on a 1TB Partition?

ext3filesystemslinux

I've got a new computer at the university and almost set up everything for myself on it when I've noticed that the previous user of the machine used a huge 1TB ext3 partition only.

I usually keep /home on a separate partition and I also prefer to use LVM, so I decided to shrink the partition using resize2fs and then create my usual LVM stuff in the space I freed up. (There is only about 30G of data on the whole hard drive, so it shouldn't be a problem).

I rebooted using a live CD and I asked resize2fs to shrink the partition to a more reasonable size (50G), and it seemed to move data around pretty intensively in the first quarter of an hour or so (judging from the noise of the hard drive).

Now it's been running for over three hours and practically no noise is heard from the HD, although the CPU usage is at 100%.

  1. Is this normal?
  2. Is resize2fs doing some intensive number crunching in the background for some reason and that's why I hear no noise from the HD?
  3. How much time should it take to resize the entire partition?

Best Answer

The times can be variable depending on loads of different things.

If you think there is a problem, open a new window or create a new PuTTY session and run dmesg (I/O errors or some such) and/or df -h (whether available space is increasing).

I suspect it will take quite a while in any case. No idea how long, personally. You might be faster to copy it to another network drive and reinstall.

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