Using Gparted to restore an outboard USB drive -- how long should this take?

[Peter N. Spotts]

Folks,

I'm using a Maxtor 300gb outboard USB hard drive with Ubuntu 5.10
installed on a Toshiba Satellite 1905-S303 laptop. Somehow, the
Maxtor's partition table got bollixed up, and how I'm trying to
repartition it (fortunately, little data stored there). Gparted saw it
and assigned it sda1, but it shows the drive as having an unknown file
system, even though it originally was linux native. So I've got it
setting up the entire drive as a single ext3 partion. But it's taking
forever to execute the repartitioning process (with no activity showing
up on Gkrellm's monitor for sda1). Interestingly, fdisk also sees the
drive as sda1, and with a linux partition, so I suppose something is
happening. How long should it take to complete this partitioning process
on a 2.4 GHz machine?

With best regards,

Pete
-- 
Peter N. Spotts | Science Correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor
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