Defragmenting and Error checkin?

elmetald00d · 04-04-2002, 03:15 PM

Where can I do a defragment on my hd and a scandisk (sorry for reference)???
0

thx

acid_kewpie · 04-04-2002, 03:51 PM

everyone asks it sooner or later. no really... *everyone*.

ext2 file systems do not require defragmentation. and use fsck to check a file system.

glock19 · 04-04-2002, 05:17 PM

are there any requirements when running fsck on your mounted partitions (like "/" and "/boot")

acid_kewpie · 04-04-2002, 05:23 PM

you shouldn't check a mounted file system, you shuold drop down to runlevel 1 and unmount /usr or whatever.

trickykid · 04-04-2002, 05:35 PM

yeah, you can run fsck on a mounted partition/file system, but you can lose data, ruin your parition...
acid responded with the correct and safe way to run fsck..

-trickykid

jeremy · 04-04-2002, 07:09 PM

I think that "ext2 does not get fragmented" is a common misconception. It *does* get fragmented. It just does not suffer the huge performance decrease that FAT file systems do, so most people do not bother. Someone (I think from SuSE) did write a defrag util from ext2, but in most cases you do not need it. I know ReiserFS plans to have a utility for this starting with v4.1 (which is quite a ways off).

--jeremy

Sixpax · 04-04-2002, 08:54 PM

Actually, most all UNIX type filesystems do a decent job of defragmenting on-the-fly so to speak. As opposed to windoze which pretty much writes randomly on the drive

jeremy · 04-04-2002, 10:51 PM

Good point, one that I forgot to mention. *NIX file systems do a much better job of writing files in contiguous blocks. The fragmentation comes in when the final size of a file is not known by the filesystem layer at write time making it impossible to allocate space in one contiguous block. Files such as logs and MySQL DB files are good examples of this.

--jeremy