I wanted to see how well the program GParted worked so I downloaded the iso burned it to a cd, rebooted, and booted from the cd. I have two operating systems installed on my 320gb HDD, xp and vista so I wanted to partition them according to how frequently I use them. I decided to shrink the xp partition by 30gb and increase the vista partition by 30gb. The shrinking phase took like 20 minutes but now the increasing phase is taking forever. I already ran it for 12 hours and it completed one step but now it looks like its running again and this time its taking twice as long. Is a simple repartition suppose to take 36 hours? If I cancel this in the middle will something bad happen or will it just not be partitioned correctly? I really dont want to run this for another 24 hours because its totally not worth it to me. This is ridiculous. Thanks for your help.

No (Partition magic takes about 30secs- without data moving ofcourse)

I'll go with faulty harddrive

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic7602.html

Its a brand new hard drive so I wouldnt think that I would be faulty. Do you think if I cancel it something extremely bad will happen?

You can cancel it if you don't care about your data or operating system

Also your CPU must be running hot (so I would)

Brand newness of anything doesn't make it error free. Even enterprise-class SCSI hard drives can fail in a couple of days.

If the XP partition is in front of the Vista one, then you are moving the entire contents of your Vista partition sector by sector. Depending on what drivers your GParted Linux is using, it can indeed take a long time.

If you cancel, the XP will probably be OK, but the Vista partition will be screwed.

Can you switch to another console (ctrl+alt+f1, ctrl+alt+f2) or open up a terminal window to check for any errors? (run dmesg to see any disk-related error messages)

there's a lot going on here.

the shrink is the easy part, data is relocated to make the new size (hopefully smallish)
and the free space is trimed.

the expansion is heavy weight stuff; a lot of data gets moved and the allocated vs free space both get updated.

it could well run many hours, especially if the HD is not running at full speed, the BIOS is not set to DMA (or has been reset to PIO).

Once started -- go out to lunch or dinner and leave it all alone!!!