my question is two fold :

1. I have non-contiguous blocks on the / and /home, both of which are on seperate paritions. This may be a stupid question but can I remove this fragmentation and is it a good idea to do so??

2. I dual boot an ntfs and rh8. The linux part is on two partitions / and /home. I tried to copy a file from /root to /home/me as su and xwindows came to a screeching halt, with some strange error message popping up (i do not have the message handy!! - sorry). Ctrl alt backspace would not reset the xserver and instead gave a white flashing cursor on a black screen. Though terminal on f1 still works when i sent the machine down for reboot it sent the broadcast message but nothing happens. furthermore it you change to say /home/me and try to do a ls the terminal locks up. There is no problem with the /home directories in the way that i can save and open etc. Why is this happening and can this problem be overcome????

I wouldn't worry too much about the fragmentation. There is a defragmentation utility called defrag for ext2 filesystems. Dunno if there are other ones around for other filesystems.

For your second problem, have you looked through the log files to see if you can find out what that mysterious error was? Where you copying from /root to the /home partition? Well since you say you have trouble doing a ls of /home/me, you might want to check the filesystem for bad blocks. Probably easiest to go to single user mode and unmount /home. Or use a rescue cd/floppy.