Repartitioning taking forever

Support & Help Requests
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I'm trying to install 22.04 along an existing Ubuntu system. The repartitioning of my 1 Tb drive has been running for about 24 hours now and I'm concerned. The system is responsive to keyboard and mouse input, although I can't get the system monitor to open, so I don't know if this is partitioning or caught in a loop.

I'm trying to keep access to all my files, even though they're backed up, and I'm afraid of interrupting the process and being left with a messed up drive. I can be patient as long as I can be confident that this is just because I have a big drive on an older computer, but it would be really nice if there were a way of knowing that this is what's going on.

The installer help says that the repartitioning could take a "long time." Is my situation just an example of how long a long time can be, or should I give up, reboot, and manually repartition?

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Welcome @mlstein to the community!

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are you moving the partition or installing because if you are moving the partition that can take a ridiculously long time, also certain types of formatting can take a while, but I would've though on most anything it would be finished in 24 hours unless maybe you chose the option to overwrite the whole partition with 1s and 0s which also may take a very long time how long idk

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I'm creating a new partition within the installer for Mate to install. So it is essentially moving a partition.

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it should not take that long to create a partition I don't think somebody that's more familiar should answer for sure, but it shouldn't take that long

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It would be better if before installing the second OS to make room on your disk. If ubuntu 22.04 had 1TB, then using a live usb you could shrink the partition to 600 GB, the rest raw. Then you could install mate on the raw 400 GB. The /boot/efi should handle booting either to ubuntu 22.04 or mate. Example ...

/dev/sda1 512MB  vfat  /boot/efi
/dev/sda2 600GB  ext4  ubuntu22.04
/dev/sda3 400GB  ext4  mate

when you boot ubuntu 22.04 you use sda1 & sda2 when you boot mate, you use sda1 & sda3

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I gave up and am trying to do that but it's taking forever just to get past "Updates and other software", even though I chose not to have those downloaded. This whole process has been a nightmare.

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if updates take forever, make sure you have a good connection and use another mirror.

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I wasn't connected and told it not to download updates. I just wanted to get to a usable system as quickly as possible.

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I am giving up on the assumption that I'm getting disc problems in a nine-year-old computer. Time to upgrade.

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Based on what you described, a dying disk sounds highly probable.

I had a disk dying on me recently, I could read from it, write to it but I was unable to create new files.

I finally tried several low-level tools but to no avail. It behaved like frozen: the disk was dead.

You might try to get a replacement disk.

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You were lucky if you could retrieve data. When my disk died I rebooted and it said no media. It is why it is so important to back up to some other media like an external hard drive or good size USB drive.

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