how to stop a partition move early

Question

I'm using gParted to try to add some free space to the beginning of a large drive. The partition was 415 GB and set gParted in motion to shrink it to 365gb and move it to the right, giving me 50gb of unallocated space at the beginning of the drive.

Only 33 gigabytes of the 415gb partition are actually used, and yet gparted is taking forever copying all of the empty space over to its new position. so far, 144gb of 365gb have been copied, and it estimates another 7 hours or so.

My question is this: I know that the data is continuous and at the beginning of the partition, as I recently (yesterday) wiped the partition and wrote the data there. Since it has already copied 144gb of the data, I feel pretty confident that the 33gb that is actually used has already been copied.

Is there any way I can speed things up, i.e. cancel the operation and write the partition table manually with the block # and sizes and the like? The data in the partition is not mission critical - if i lose it it'd be a pain but not the end of the world, so i'm willing to try risky maneuvers.

Answer 1

I (think) what GParted is doing is moving every single bit over to the right, which will take forever with a few hundred gigs. You could of sped the process up by simply backing up the small amount of files, reformatting and recreating the partitions, and moving back. Probably would of been better since starting afresh is always good.

Just a note: Do NOT interrupt GParted! Doing so will most likely corrupt your partition table or other important disk parts.