extremely slow parted execution

[Attila Tajti]

I'm having a problem with parted executing very slowly.

I tried to resize a partition a 16G FAT32 on my Gentoo Linux system 
(2.4.20-lolo-r2_pre5 kernel, Athlon 1.2GHz, 512M RAM, 80G UDMA 66 disk).
I tried to resize my last partition, which was 16G to free up 10G. It was 10% 
full (~1.6G so 6G should be ok). Parted seem to be working with 100% CPU
utilisation, but I see only a short blink of the HDD led in every 3-4 seconds.
dmesg contains only the line "invalidate: busy buffer" in it. It is still 
running, but I think I'll have to abort the resize process. I backed up my 
most important data anyway.

Possible problem: I unmounted this partition using unmount -l because another
computer accessed it via samba. After it I restarted the samba service before
starting parted.

# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root              5526152   5129652    396500  93% /
/dev/hda9             16562856   1603056  14959800  10% /mnt/storage
/dev/hda6             50331612  30867468  19464144  62% /mnt/windows
none                    257800         0    257800   0% /dev/shm

[...]

# parted
GNU Parted 1.6.5
Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT 
ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR 
A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Using /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc is 9732/255/63.  Therefore, cylinder 
1024
ends at 8032.499M.
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 0.000-76345.500 
megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031   4094.692  primary   ntfs        boot
2       4094.692  76340.126  extended              lba
5       4094.723   5122.287  logical   linux-swap
6       5122.318  54274.284  logical   ntfs
7      54274.315  54752.783  logical   ext2
8      54752.814  60149.619  logical   reiserfs
9      60149.650  76340.126  logical   fat32
(parted) check 9
(parted) check 8
Error: Filesystem isn't in valid state. Possible it is mounted.
(parted) resize 9 70000.000 76340.126
moving data... 4%       (time left 129:27)

-- 
Attila Tajti
Spacehawks, Inc
address@hidden