Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

[ultrageeky]

I'm in the middle of installing 9.04 64bit. The installation program has stalled at 50% whilst resizing the partition on a 500GB HDD (It's creating an additional 30.7 GB partition). The installation has been running for over 10 hours, has stayed where it is for around 2 hours and I don't want to lose the 360GB of data that is already written to the disk. Please can somebody offer some advice that will enable me to keep the data on my disk intact?

A little background info:

I have two disks (had 3 but one packed-up hence this installation), the 1st disk is 200GB, 2nd is 500GB; both are are SATA but are running non-synchronously. The 500GB disk holds some important docs that I wouldn't mind moving over to the 200GB disk but Dolphin tells me both drives are locked hence I can't access them (I would have installed to the 200GB drive but there's not much free space on it). The disk that packed-up is no longer registered by my BIOS - I've stripped and cleaned my PC, stuck the drive in the freezer (to free the mechanisms), defrosted it and re-tried it but it just will not work (I'm glad I only used it for the OS).

Just being able to access the 500GB disk so that can back-p data to DVD would be a massive bonus. Usually I'd do that with a live disk but I couldn't do it this time (tried Kubuntu 8.10, the Ultimate Boot CD and the System Rescue Disc; but none worked).

Please help!!!

[barbolani]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

Sounds that your 500GB disk is also in trouble.

Partition resizing does not shuffle data around unless necessary. If you were shrinking a partition the only thing it should do on an existing partition is:

1- Move the data that is currently written on the area of the disk that you want to free to unallocated regions of the disk that lie inside the reduced partition.
2- Rewrite the file access structures on the disk so that they "see" a smaller are to manage. There are usually redundant copies stored and all of them have to be updated.
3- Update the partition table accordingly.

Unless you have a large amount of data written in the soon to be freed part of the disk, this should take minutes, not hours.

Now, depending on the place where the process (1,2, or 3) has frozen you'll have to deal with:

1- Nothing has happened. At worst the crash happened during a write to the directory structure updating the location of some piece of data. In this case, a copy of the directory structure is out of synch with the others. Nothing that a standard disk utility cannot notice or fix.
2- Not sure of how to fix this one, but unless the box has frozen just in middle of writing one of the disk structure copies, this would mean that perhaps you've lost some data belonging to the part that is not written. Perhaps an utility that allowed you to restore one of the sane copies of the directory structure would allow you to not to lose any data (however I'm not sure which program can do this)
3- If the partition table is scrambled, there are redundant copies of it as well that can be restored (again, don't have any concrete names on hand) If it was just not written, resizing the partition again will do the trick, and would be much faster as there would be no need of any data changes.

However, before doing anything else, make sure that the disk is not broken. And above all, BEWARE. Do not write anything to the disk until you're sure that it's ok to do it. If you want to be safe, it's better to take an image of it and work on a copy of the image.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

Barbolani, thank you for replying. I waited another couple of hours before accepting it just wasn't going to budge then restarted the system. I ran the installation process again; and again there were repartitioning problems. I think the drive will be O.K - more like I'm hoping I haven't lost any data. I don't want to try installing to the 200GB drive because the data held there is more valuable; so it looks like I'm going to get a new drive - 40GB should do just to hold the OS.

I didn't realise the drive would have a back-up partition table; that could come in handy.

Something puzzles me about the crashed (160GB) drive: the BIOS sometimes detects it but loses it after GRUB. I'm wondering whether the problem is mobo related; I've reset the BIOS but I will pull the battery and remove the jump-plug to ensure it's fully cleared.

Off-topic - if anyone at Kubuntu development is reading this, the live disk OS has problems keeping pace with my keyboard (MS Natural Ergonomics 4000 v1.0 - horrible thing to use at the best of times) - letters are not always detected, some display severally from a single key depression.

[barbolani]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

ultrageeky, I think that there are too many strange things (keyboard not keeping up?) happening at the same time with your hardware to assume that it's all due to a problem with the disk(s) themselves. Can you plug them into another motherboard and see if they are properly recognized and accessible?

I agree with you that if the data on the other disk is too valuable I'd not take the risk of attempting another install on it. At least without making sure first that is not a problem with the motherboard or anything else.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

I've accessed my working drives from the live disk by using sudo mount -a. The data (that I'm worried about enough to check) on the 500GB HDD seems to be intact so (all fingers crossed) that's not been affected by the previous installation attempts. I might be able to try the crashed drive on another computer; if I may then I'll let you know the result tomorrow - 22:13 in the U.K so it's too late to grab someone else's PC.

I'm thinking of sticking my OS onto a USB (pen) drive instead of an HDD. It'll work out cheaper albeit a little slower.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

I've been able to access the duff drive

I cleared my BIOS's RTC RAM by removing the battery and adjusting the jumper on the mobo (lost the cap under the mobo so had to hunt around to find a new one). This caused the drive to register again (could be co-incidence) and it nearly booted into the OS but collapsed after a few steps from loading the GUI.

Next, I disconnected the drive from my mobo, booted up the system using the 9.04 64 live CD, changed the jumper on the drive to effect data transference of 1.5Gb/s from 3Gb/s, let the drive cool, reconnected the drive whilst the system was running (remember it's a SATA (for those who want to know: disconnect and reconnect using the connectors on the drive not the mobo) then waited for it to be detected; which it was (woohoo, I'm the king of this baby...ahem, slight moment of euphoric madness ). Thankfully, I've been able to copy over to another drive the files stored in my Desktop folder (all 600 or so mb). Not sure but I think the main solution was effected by changing down to 1,5Gb from 3Gb.

On first detection and attempt to access the drive the system reported an error - freedesktop.dbus.error.

Fortunately the drive is still under warranty (until end of June '09) so I will get it replaced by Maxtor.

I'm now going to attempt to install Kubuntu 9.04 onto the duff hdd and see what happens (at least I will have wiped it of data ready for returning it to Maxtor).

In summery, for those with a similar issue i.e. hdd failure,

Clear BIOS RAM (disconnect PC from mains, remove battery, set clear BIOS jump switch (as dscribed in mobo manual else somewhere on the net), replace battery),
Disconnect the duff hdd (at the terminals on the hdd not the mobo),
Reconnect the PC's power cord (I have a few hundred US power cords if anyone wants to make an offer ),
Boot the system using the live CD,
Change the HDD's data rate (see the label on the drive for jumper settings),
Once the OS has fully loaded, reconnect the hdd (I connected power cable then SATA cable),
The OS should now detect the drive long enough for data to be backed up.

Once I've re-installed Kubuntu to the duff drive and checked it will load the OS, I'll change the data rate back to 3Gb/s, see what happens then report back here.

[barbolani]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

Wow, what an adventure. I'm glad that you were able to finally recover. However, I think that it's worth noting to the uninitiated that what you did would probably only help with the same kind of drive failure, not in the general case.

The idea of resetting the BIOS and changing the data rate is weird, but clearly worked, how did you arrived at that solution? I'd never have thought to try that. Brilliant.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Frozen At 50% Whilst Resizing Partiion

A long time go...I worked as an IT technician...sometimes computer BIOS's would get clogged up with system information (logs) and I'd need to clear them to get them to redetect hardware from scratch and boot without foreknowledge of errors; sometimes worked, often didn't but I hoped it would help in this case. I tried changing the data rate on the off-chance that the drive was either over heating hence cutting-out, or the head was having difficulty reading the disks, else it might bypass faulty circuitry - a little bit of straw clutching was involved

I did manage to re-install Kubuntu successfully onto the drive but problems occurred: loaded part way but lost drive detection at some point then there was a GRUB error on the 2nd reboot attempt.

The good things are that I recovered the little bit of data I needed from the drive (fortunately I never stored much on it for longer than a week (or two!)), I wiped the drive ready for returning it to Maxtor for a warranty replacement (never anything special on it but I value my privacy), and I've learned some new tricks that hopefully others might make use of too.

Barbolani, thank you for your help