Resizing of partitions taking too long in Debian 6 installer

Question

I had a Windows 7 PC, with three partitions on it:

1. The default Windows partition (~300GB in size, primary)
2. Some system stuff Windows 7 needs (100MB in size, primary)
3. A partition called Shared, that I saved all my media and data to (487.5GB in size, logical).

I wanted to dual boot Debian 6 (for programming) and Windows 7 (for video games).

I have intended for the Shared partition to be used both by Debian 6 and Windows 7, so I have formatted it with NTFS prior to moving files on it and trying to install Debian 6.

Now, with all of my files in place, I thought it was time to install Debian 6, from the 600MB CD image.

I put the disc in, and rebooted my computer from it.

Then, I chose the graphical install; there were some error messages about missing network firmware, a problem which I chose to solve once the whole system is running, but all in all everything went smoothly up to the disk partitioning point.

I chose to shrink the Shared partition by 50GB, in order to create a new partition on which I would install Debian 6 on.

However, it has been over half an hour since the resize of the (logical) partition was started, and the progress bar is still displaying "Please wait".

What is going on?
Is this normal?
How much longer will I need to wait?
Am I at risk of losing parts of my HDD?

Answer 1

The issue resolved itself.

It seems like the installer wasn't updating the progress-bar, and in a little under 45 minutes, the new 50GB partition was successfully created and marked as "free space".

Answer 2

Quick calculation: Worst case, resizing or moving a partition might need to read/write all of that partition's data once or even more. Modern spinning hard drives sustain around 100 MB/sec. So resizing 480 GB could easily take 1.5 hours, even before taking seek times into account.