[Wolves] defrag

[Mo Awkati]

By the sound of it I will not be needing half the number of tools that I am used to using under Windows. 
 
Thanks 
 
Mo
 


Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver at mavit.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, sparkes wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 18:51, Mo Awkati wrote:
> 
> > > > I am sorry if this sounds a bit newbie, but how do I scan and defrag the
> > > > hard disc under Linux??
> > > 
> > > there's normally no need.
> >
> > Why is that? What if there is a bad sector on the hard drive that
> > needs to be "ignored"?

Is this really the thing to do to a dodgy disk under Windows?

> fsck (the butt of many jokes) will sort out any problems you have. This
> will run on boot whenever the system believes it needs to.

AFAIK, fsck only handles filesystem corruption. Bad-blocks are handled by
the drives themselves (all disks have a certain number of bad blocks
from the word go) and by the kernel as it goes along.

Anyway, IIRC, once upon a time someone did write a defrag tool for ext2,
the default Linux filesystem, but it was so seldom used that nobody
bothered to maintain it.

VxFS, a filesystem written by Veritas, does have a defrag tool that they
suggest you run at least once a month, but it doesn't seem to have much in
common with the Windows FAT defrag, only taking a few minutes to run.

-- 
Peter Oliver

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