Partition exchange

I am in the process of moving the partitions of a table from ASSM to a non-assm tablespace using the partition exchange method (create non partitioned table, indexes, constraints etc.). When I do the alter table exchange partition including indexes without validation command it runs for hours, doing a full table scan on all the partitions of the partitioned table which takes many hours. I understood that just the data dictionary is updated, and it should take a few seconds. Primary Wait event is db file scattered read. Can anyone shed some light on this phenomenon. DB version is 10.2.0.3 and is running on Solaris 10.    

Thanks,

Ken

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