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

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Update: the whole process finished in a bit more than four hours, and yes, the HD was totally silent apart from the first 15 minutes or so. So, in a nutshell, this is totally normal. – Tamás Dec 19 '10 at 17:08
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The times can be variable depending on loads of different things. If you think there's a problem, open a new window or switch to a new PTTY and run "dmesg"-- it'll tell you if it's experiencing i/o errors or somesuch.

I suspect it'll 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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