RE: Newbie: How do I defrag my (FAT) drive?

From: Kretzer, Jason R (Big Sandy) (jason.kretzer_at_kctcs.edu)
Date: 08/24/05

  • Next message: Paolo Pantaleo: "mouse & kernel 2.6" 
    Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:29:37 -0400
To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>

    I would boot a Windows/DOS boot disk and run defrag from there. I would
    not try it from linux. Just my first thoughts.

    -Jason

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Hendrik Boom [mailto:hendrik@pooq.com]
    Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:25 AM
    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
    Subject: Re: Newbie: How do I defrag my (FAT) drive?

    On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 05:49:58PM +0200, Tim Ruehsen wrote:
    >
    > > You don't need to. You only need to defragment your disk if your
    > > operating system is incapable of keeping the fragmentation under
    > > control, and Linux does not suffer from this problem.
    >
    > Many people say so, but it is not true.
    >
    > Ext2 takes some precautions to reduce fragmentation a bit (in
    comparison with
    > (V)FAT), but ext2 can't prevent it. And it is not a feature of 'Linux'
    it is
    > a feature of the filesystem.

    While we're on the subject, how *do* you defragment an MSDOS file system
    when you're running Linux. I'm faced with a MSDOS-formatted USB drive
    that is used to ferry data to a plugin for a Nintendo DS that
    requires each file to be contiguous.

    -- hendrik 

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