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I'm running "Repair Filesystem" through the Disks utility on a 2TB external HD. I kicked off the process about 10 hours ago and it appears to still be running, although I can't be certain. The little loading graphic next to the drive in the left sidebar is spinning, but the same graphic in the lower left corner of the partition illustration has been frozen the whole time. Here's what the Disks window looks like right now: Disks screenshot

Looking at the system monitor, the gnome-disks process seems to not be using very much CPU or memory. System Monitor screenshot

Here's what I'm wondering:

  • Is there a way to tell whether the Repair Filesystem is actually doing anything vs frozen?
  • If it is actually running, is there any way to view progress.
  • Or alternatively, any guesses as to what a reasonable maximum time would be to expect for a 2TB drive to be repaired over a USB 2.0 connection? Just wondering if 10+ hours is reasonable or if this thing is just stalled.
  • Whether or not it is running, is it risky to click that little "X" button next to the Job name? The data on the drive would be nice to recover, but isn't critical.

Update: I decided to risk clicking the "X" to cancel the process. It didn't seem to do anything at first, but clicking a second time brings up an alert that says "Error canceling job. The job has already been cancelled (udisks-error-quark,2)". However, the UI still indicates that the process is running and has been for about 45 minutes. Alert Screenshot. Disks Screenshot.

Update 2: I needed to move on to other things, so I killed the gnome-disks process via the System Monitor and unplugged the drive. The drive still behaves the same way as it did before (can't be mounted and tends to freeze up apps that try to access it). Hopefully I didn't mess things up even more, but I'll try a different approach to fixing the drive or recovering the data another day.

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  • Why did you start this process to begin with? If the hard drive is dying or damaged, it may never finish.
    – Nmath
    May 7, 2022 at 18:29
  • The drive hasn't been mountable by either Ubuntu or Windows 10. I was able to see that a lot of data still exists via DMDE on windows, but the recovery process was taking far too long so I'm just trying to make the drive mountable again.
    – bjmiller
    May 7, 2022 at 18:44

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Welcome to Ask Ubuntu!

I don't have any conclusive answers for the first 2 questions, but you can try looking up the Disks utility on your machine via GNOME's System Monitor, or by opening a terminal and typing in top to view currently running processes.

From my experiences with external hard disks, I feel 10+ hours for an intensive read and write repair operation on an external USB 2.0 2TB hard disk drive seems about right, though the exact time will depend a lot on your hard disk speed, computer hardware, and the type of external connector used.

Here's a link to the GNOME Disks utility for your further reference and what you might want to do going forward.

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/disk-repair.html.en

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  • Thanks for the advice. I did have a look at the System Monitor (see screenshot in my original post) and the gnome-disks process is running, but not using up much CPU or memory. Which makes me think it might not have been doing anything.
    – bjmiller
    May 7, 2022 at 22:17

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