13 hour run with no change afterwards

[Andrew]

Hi,
I've got an older 200G HDD and just bought a 250G HDD
Both are the same brand (WD) and report exactly the
same geometry other than cylinders.
I directly copied the 200G to the 250G (~5hrs)
(equivalent of a file copy of /dev/hdc to /dev/hdf)
Next I rebooted to remove the /dev/hdc drive 
The new partition looks OK and works OK read-only.

I ran parted on the console.

Below is a recreation (with GPL removed) but is exactly the same anyway.
It took about 13 hours to run and showed NO progress info at all
(is there some way to get progress???)
Basically I wanted to resize to '250G' less 1024Mb
Parted didn't display any messages about the end value I entered.

address@hidden ~]# parted /dev/hdf
GNU Parted 1.6.15
 
Using /dev/hdf
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/hdf: 0.000-238475.179 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031 190779.719  primary   ext3        boot
(parted) resize 1
Start?  [0.0308]?
End?  [190779.7188]? 237451
(parted) quit

Now when I check the drive it looks exactly the same - still
with exactly the same partition table (even after a reboot)
Any idea what happened for 13 hours?

The HDD light was full on running the whole time.

I then ran it a 2nd time as:

'date ; parted /dev/hdf resize 1 0.031 237451 ; date'

And this time it took only 1 hour but still a
'parted /dev/hdf print' shows it unchanged.

(OS is FC3)

I've done this once before and had the same result about a year
or so ago but not sure if the target was 200G or 250G and the
source was probably an 80G
I did eventually get it resized using parted last time, but not
sure if I had to run it a few times or what happened.

Anyone got any idea what's happening?
Could it be a result of the raw copy?

-Thanks for any help
-Andrew